BMERC Seminar

When:       Monday, April 7, 2:00 pm

Where:      ENG room 203, 44 Cummington Street

Title:          Interactive drug discovery technologies as complement to fragment based drug discovery

Speaker:  Prof. Carlos J. Camacho
Department of Computational and Systems Biology
University of Pittsburgh

Abstract:  Although there is no shortage of potential drug targets, there are only a handful of known low-molecular-weight inhibitors of protein-protein interactions (PPIs). One problem is that current efforts are dominated by low-yield high-throughput screening, whose rigid framework is not suitable for the diverse chemotypes present in PPIs. Here, we present AnchorQuery a novel pharmacophore-based interactive screening technology that builds on the role anchor residues, or deeply buried hot spots, have in PPIs, to increase hit rates by redesigning these entry points with anchor-biased virtual multicomponent reactions (MCR). This chemistry delivers hundreds of millions of readily synthesizable novel compounds especially suitable to disrupt PPIs, which typically are not amenable to traditional small molecule intervention. Our Google-like technology promises to expand the development of novel chemical probes for cancer research and the exploration of the human interactome by !
leveraging the designability of MCR to design inhibitors to one and/or multiple targets.