Report from Education & Training Committee (ETC)

The Committee for Education and Training of the EFMC (Peter Matyus – chair –, Peter Mohr, Giuseppe Ronsisvalle, Alan Stobie, Henk Timmerman, Anna Tsantili, and Danijel Kikelj, Javier Fernandez sent his regrets) gathered on the first weekend of March at the Faculty of Pharmacy in Ljubljana, the charming capital of Slovenia, where it was hosted wit great hospitality by Prof. Danijel Kikelj. Main objectives of our committee include to foster tight cooperation between academia and industry, to ensure state of the art training of medicinal chemists throughout Europe, and to provide a platform to anticipate and address future trends in due time.

A detailed synopsis of our two day discussion is clearly beyond the scope of this concise summary. But two topics definitely deserve to be mentioned: our committee will organize at the ISMC in Brussels its own session, dedicated to “Teaching Medicinal Chemistry”. Three renowned speakers have been identified and will give us an account of present gaps and future trends from their perspective.

The first EFMC short course discussing in depth ADME-properties was successfully organized last year, the second one is supposed to take place this April in Oegstgeest (NL), dealing with the hot topic “Safety and Attrition” (see www.ldorganisation.com/produits.php?langue=english&cle_menus=1238915346)

Taking into account the positive feedback, our committee unanimously proposes to the EC to continue establishing such three day short courses. It pondered already about putative topics and tried to identify suitable coordinators. Details will be announced via this channel in due time; suffices to mention here that highly interesting themes have been selected for the EC’s consideration like “Pharmacology for Medicinal Chemists”, “Target Selection through Application of Chemical and Systems Biology”, or “Structural Biology, Biophysics and Molecular Interactions”. We are convinced that such inspiring events will attract even in the present rough economic environment many interested medicinal chemists from all over Europe..

By Peter Mohr