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Podcasts

  • Evotec strengthens and expands its Alliance Business
    Dr Mark Ashton is Executive Vice President, Business Development of Evotec and is responsible for Evotec's commercial and partnering activities. Prior to assuming responsibility for Business Development in 2005, Dr Ashton held a number of positions within Operations at Evotec: He joined the Company in 1995 as one of the initial employees of the Discovery Division, becoming Department Manager in 2001, Director of Chemistry Services in 2002 and taking over responsibility for Evotec's Discovery Services Division in 2004, where he had responsibility for Evotec's screening, parallel synthesis and medicinal chemistry operations. During his time at Evotec, Dr Ashton has managed a wide range of pharmaceutical and biotechnology related projects, including medicinal chemistry projects, design and synthesis of screening libraries and technology transfer projects and has been involved in the progression of a number of drug candidates into the clinic in numerous therapeutic areas. Dr Ashton has authored and co-authored a number of peer reviewed papers, articles and book chapters in addition to being named on a number of pharmaceutical patents. He is trained as a medicinal chemist. Prior to joining Evotec, Dr Ashton also had spells at ICI Pharmaceuticals and Organon Laboratories. Mark Whittaker is Senior Vice President Drug Discovery at Evotec where he manages a large drug discovery collaboration and the groups of computational chemistry and structural biology. Before joining Evotec in 2001, Mark spent 13 years at British Biotech Pharmaceuticals where he led a number of medicinal chemistry programmes and was latterly Director of Chemistry. At British Biotech, Mark contributed to the discovery and development of six compounds that have progressed into human clinical trials. Before his career at British Biotech, Mark carried out post-doctoral research at the University of Oxford and at York University, Toronto and obtained a D. Phil in Chemistry from the University of York.
  • The Ubiquitin Story
    In this podcast interview with Drug Discovery Today, Nobel Prize winner Professor Aaron Ciechanover will talk about his career, his Nobel Prize-winning discovery of the UPS, and the extraordinary opportunities and challenges for drug discovery in this area.
  • Califf, Behrman and Kramer discuss the Clinical Trials Transformation Initiative.
    Download the Califf, Behrman and Kramer podcast as an mp3 file
  • Dr Brent Vose outlines AstraZeneca's oncology pipeline.
    Download the Dr. Brent Vose podcast as an mp3 file
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Webinars

  • The Promise of Epigenetics in Early Stage Drug Discovery
    Epigenetic targets are exciting to drug discovery scientists because they hold great potential across a wide spectrum of therapeutic areas. The field of epigenetics focuses on the investigation of enzymes that alter gene expression through modification of their target substrates, usually through the addition or removal of methyl or acetyl groups. High-throughput assays to identify agents capable of modifying the action of such enzyme targets has, in the past, proven to be challenging due to the relatively small molecular alterations in addition to the possibility of sequential modifications, leading to multiple end products. As such, high-throughput bioassays that allow the direct, concurrent quantification of multiple modification states are attractive. The RapidFire platform enables high-throughput mass spectrometric analysis of native molecules from in vitro reactions by performing on-line desalting in seconds, as opposed to HPLC, which requires minutes. Moreover, the RapidFire system can be connected to any mass spectrometer providing unparalleled versatility in reaction detection.
  • Integrated Quant / Qual for In-vivo Discovery Bioanalysis using Hybrid Quadrupole-Time-of-Flight Mass Spectrometry
    Ultra high performance liquid chromatography (UHPLC) coupled with orthogonal acceleration hybrid quadrupole-time-of-flight (QqTOF) mass spectrometry is an emerging technique offering new strategies for the efficient screening of new chemical entities (NCE) and related molecules at the early discovery stage within the pharmaceutical industry.
  • Drug Delivery: enabling technology for discovery and development
    The integration of pharmacodynamic and pharmacokinetic parameters in non clinical pharmacology studies is a key aspect in drug discovery for efficacy and safety assessment, in the particular for the translation from the non clinical to the clinical field. Modeling the profile of plasma exposure achieved with the intended therapeutic route often requires the use of intravenous infusion. In addition, in most cases infusion parameters (infusion rate, volume, duration and sequences) need to be customized to achieve the appropriate pattern of plasma drug exposure. When pharmacodynamic parameters are recorded by telemetry, the use of implantable pumps rather than external pumps is necessary to preserve the improvement in physiological data recording offered by telemetry.
  • Part 2: How has HR-MS technology fundamentally changed the way we study drug biotransformation and disposition?
    AB SCIEX is proud to present the 2nd installment of a Global 4-Part Live Webinar Series exploring novel and dynamic workflows for Metabolite Identification & Drug Metabolism solutions as it pertains to the 4 main stages of the drug discovery and development paradigm, Lead Discovery, Late Stage Discovery, Early Development and Late Stage Development. Part 2 of this webinar series will focus on how HRMS technology has fundamentally changed the way metabolite biotransformations are investigated in Lead Discovery.
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Features

  • Drug discovery in the era of Facebook—new tools for scientific networking
    This article is involved with the impact that social networking is beginning to make on drug discovery process. While bioinformaticsand chemoinformatics underpin research at a scientific level, rapid communication between individual researchers across continents now allows the global exchange of ideas, tools and technologies.Networking at this level of speed and reach is quite a recent phenomenon. It facilitates the developmentof common interests, accelerates technology transfer and increases cooperative and competitive behaviour. The article critically evaluates different web-based networking approaches as effectivere sources for the drug discovery scientist.
  • Drug Discovery Today: highlighted review. ‘Metabolite-likeness’ as a criterion in the design and selection of pharmaceutical drug libraries
    This highlighted review from Drug Discovery Today by Dobson, Patel and Kell outlines how "metabolite-likeness" in an analogous manner to "drug-likeness" and "lead-likeness" can be used to improve the value of compound libraries design by incorporating features of endogenous metabolites ("endogenites")
  • Most downloaded review Q1 2009: Target discovery from data mining approaches
    The most downloaded review article from Drug Discovery Today from the first quarter of 2009 deals with the topic of target discovery from the informatics perspective. It would be difficult to overstate the value to Pharma of identifying and validating the most relevant therapeutic targets. In this article, Yang, Adelstein and Kassis outline text mining, its value and limitations and application to target discovery. In addition, they cover the field of emerging and integrated data mining approaches.
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Downloads

  • The role of fragment-based and computational methods in polypharmacology
    In this article Giovanni Bottegoni et al. report on fragment-based and computational methods that might accelerate and optimize the discovery of multitarget drugs. In particular, they illustrate that fragment-based approaches can be particularly suited for polypharmacology, owing to the inherent promiscuous nature of fragments.
  • The value of in silico chemistry in the safety assessment of chemicals in the consumer goods and pharmaceutical industries
    In this article Sandeep Modi, Michael Hughes, Andrew Garrow and Andrew White discuss limitations and strengths of in silico tools. Additionally, they look at different parameters that are necessary to make the best use of these tools, and also how to gain acceptance outside the modelling community and into the regulatory arena.
  • In silico repositioning of approved drugs for rare and neglected diseases
    Sean Ekins, Antony J. Williams, Matthew D. Krasowski and Joel S. Freundlich discuss how drug repurposing will emerge for neglected or rare and/or orphan diseases. Using proof-of-principle examples, they suggest that with current in silico technologies and databases of the structures and biological activities of chemical compounds (drugs) and related data, as well as close integration with in vitro screening data, improved opportunities for drug repurposing will emerge for neglected or rare/orphan diseases.
  • Toward in silico structure-based ADMET prediction in drug discovery
    In this article Gautier Moroy, Virginie Y. Martiny, Philippe Vayer, Bruno O. Villoutreix and Maria A. Miteva discuss recently reported in silico studies aiming at predicting small molecules binding to ADMET-related proteins based on the knowledge of the 3D structures of these macromolecules with a special emphasis on metabolizing enzymes.
  • Computational models for predicting substrates or inhibitors of P-glycoprotein
    Lei Chen, Youyong Li, Huidong Yu, Liling Zhang and Tingjun Hou review in silico approaches and computational models for identifying substrates or inhibitors of P-gp. The advances in the datasets for model building and available computational models are summarized and the advantages and drawbacks of these models are outlined.
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