Rod Hubbard to Speak at GTC Drug Design Conference, May 8-10, 2013 in Boston, MA

MONROVIA, CA, February 19, 2013 (Press-News.org) Roderick Hubbard, long-time expert in the field of drug design, will deliver the keynote address at GTC's 7th Drug Design & Medicinal Chemistry Conference, to be held May 8-10, 2013 in Boston, MA.

Professor Hubbard, who divides his time between academic research at the York Structural Biology Laboratory and applied research at the pharmaceutical company Vernalis, has a unique and balanced perspective of drug discovery in both academia and industry. He will review recent developments in the field during his presentation, "Current Perspectives in Fragment-Based Drug Discovery."

The past ten years have seen tremendous developments in the experimental methods of fragment-based discovery, with many compounds now in clinical trials and the first compound now on the market. The central feature is that the drug discovery process begins with identification of small (_250 MW), weakly binding (affinity of 100s of µM) compounds, which are then optimized to drug candidates by structure-guided design. The advantages of such design are that a small library can sample a potentially large chemical diversity to generate novel lead compounds and that hits can be identified for new classes of target where existing compound collections fail.

Professor Hubbard will also cover key issues such as deciding which fragments to progress, introducing more 3-D fragments, and working with unconventional targets such as protein-protein interactions.

Roderick Hubbard has been working with methods for analysis and exploitation of protein structure for over 30 years. In the 1980s, he developed molecular modeling methods; and in the 1990s he helped build the Structural Biology Lab at the University of York. Since 2001, he has worked at the company Vernalis, establishing and applying structure and fragment-based methods to discover new compounds which can be taken forward in clinical trials to treat cancer.

GTC's 7th Drug Design & Medicinal Chemistry conference provides a forum for leaders from both industry and academia working in the fields of medicinal chemistry, computational chemistry, structural biology and related areas to review advances in established methods in drug discovery and discuss hot topics such as epigenetics, binding kinetics, data sharing and many more.

To view the agenda, click here.
To view the speaker list, click here.

The conference is part of the Drug Discovery Summit 2013, and will run parallel with three other exciting conferences:

Orphan Drugs Research and Commercialization
3rd Epigenetics in Drug Discovery
6th Imaging in Drug Discovery and Development

For more information, please visit http://www.gtcbio.com/drugdesign

GTC organizes conferences specifically for the biomedical and biopharmaceutical industries. Our goal is to facilitate the exchange of biopharmaceutical and biomedical intelligence between industry leaders, academic institutions, government organizations and the financial community.

GTC (Global Technology Community), LLC, is a privately held company founded in 2002.