EFMC Schools on Medicinal Chemistry



4th Summer School on Drug Design, Vienna, Sept. 16-21, 2007

EFMC-sponsored Schools currently comprise ESMEC-Urbino, LACDR-Leiden/Amsterdam, the Swiss Course on Medicinal Chemistry and recently also the Vienna School on Drug Design joined the club.

The Vienna school is organised each second year and focuses on computational methods in drug discovery and design and - for the first time – was held in English and broadly announced throughout Europe. Participation normally is limited to 50 persons to enable proper organisation of the hands-on sessions, which take place in the afternoons. As the school always is heavily overbooked, the fourth edition for the first time offered also a “lectures only” option. Thus, together with the 20 speaker this time almost 100 participants were registered and spent one week in Vienna.


The School traditionally opens on Sunday evening with a general talk, which was given by Gerd Folkers, Collegium Helveticum: “How culture gets under your skin”.

During the week, the participants had the opportunity to listen to four talks from Hugo Kubiny, who this time focussed on chemical similarity, chemogenomis, prodrugs and metabolism.
Despite overviews on software packages (T. Langer), QSAR methods (G. Ecker) and in depth presentations of new software tools by the Chemical Computing Group, Tripos, Inte:ligand, and BiosolveIT, the 4th edition also covered structure based design (W. Sippl, C. Sotriffer), QM/MM methods (H.-D. Hoeltje), pharmacophore modelling (G. Wolber), virtual combinatorial chemistry (T. Langer), conformational sampling (P. Wolschann), and artificial neural networks (G. Ecker).
A strong emphasis was also given to case studies from Academia and Industry, with talks from W. Sippl, C. Buenemann and T. Ullrich (Novartis), P. Ettmayer and E. Haaksma (Boehringer-Ingelheim), and K.-J. Schleifer (BASF).


The afternoons were devoted to hands-on sessions, which were organised by BiosolveIT, Chemical Computing Group, Inte:ligand and Tripos. Participants were spread over two computer rooms each equipped with 20 PCs and thus were able to work with software packages from all four companies. Company representatives were present throughout the meeting to demonstrate latest developments of their software packages.


Important dates for EFMC sponsored Schools organised in 2008:

ESMEC-Urbino: July 6-11, 2008
LACDR Leiden/Amsterdam: October 28-31, 2008
Swiss Course: October 12-17, 2008

For further information on EFMC sponsored schools, please visit www.efmc.info

By Gerhard Ecker, University of Vienna


Editor

Gerhard Ecker
Univ. Vienna, AT

Editorial Committee

Koen Augustyns
Univ. Antwerpen, BE

Erden Banoglu
Gazi Univ., TR

Gabriele Costantino
Univ. Parma, IT

Jordi Mestres
IMIM-UPF, ES

Kristian Stromgaard
Univ. Copenhagen, DK

Executive Committee

Roberto Pellicciari President
Gerhard F.Ecker Pres. Elect
Rasmus P.Clausen Secr/Treas
David Alker Member
Brigitte Lesur Member
Peter Matuys Member

For more information please contact info@efmc.info