News from the Societies

Malcolm Campbell Memorial Prize 2011

The Biological and Medicinal Chemistry Sector of the RSC is proud to announce the winner of the Malcolm Campbell Memorial Prize for 2011.  The prize has been awarded to the Liverpool team of Paul M. O’Neill, B. Kevin Park and Stephen A. Ward for work in the area of antimalarial drug discovery and chemical biology of Plasmodium falciparum.

The Malcolm Campbell Memorial prize commemorates Professor Campbell’s outstanding contributions in a broad range of chemistry and their applications to the understanding of bioactivity.  The prize is awarded biennially and the 2011 prize will be formally presented to the winning team during the RSC/SCI Medicinal Chemistry Symposium to be held in Cambridge, 11th-14th September 2011.

The BMCS Committee wishes to express its gratitude for the high quality entries from both academia and industry for the 2011 award.   Details of the Award may be found here and details of forthcoming RSC-BMCS events may be found here.

BMCS Postgraduate Symposium for Biological and Medicinal Chemistry
10th December, 2010 at the Chemistry Department, Cambridge University

The Biological and Medicinal Chemistry Sector (BMCS) Postgraduate Symposium on Biological and Medicinal Chemistry was held in the Department of Chemistry at the University of Cambridge on Friday 10th December 2010. This annual symposium for PhD and postdoctoral students working in biological chemistry, medicinal chemistry, or related areas event aims to provide students working in these fields with an opportunity to present their research work in public and also to learn a little about the drug discovery and development process. The programme included keynote lectures by Professor Barry Potter from the School of Pharmacy at the University of Bath, one of the winners of the 2009 Malcolm Campbell Award, Dr Steve Lindell from Bayer CropScience in Germany and Dr Matt Tozer from Peakdale Molecular. There is no registration fee for the symposium which was attended by 140 students from across the UK as well as one participant from Italy and one from the USA.

There were also nine oral presentations and 20 poster presentations from students, whose work covers cutting edge research in the areas of biological chemistry and drug discovery, potentially leading to advances which could positively influence the future of drug treatment. Prizes were awarded for the best presentations with the oral prize going to Zhiyong Yu from Imperial College for his work titled ‘Design and synthesis of Inhibitors for Plasmodium falciparum N-Myristoy-Transferase: a promising target for antimalarial drugs’ while the poster prize went to Rebecca Nonoo, also from Imperial College, for her work titled 'Towards kinetic template-guided tethering of fragments'

Advance notice – the 2011 symposium will be held in the Department of Chemistry at the University of Cambridge from 1000 to 1800 on Friday 9th December 2011

Zhiyong Yu from the Department of Chemistry, Imperial College, winner of the oral presentation prize at the symposium, being presented with his cheque for £250 by Professor Barry Potter from the School of Pharmacy, University of Bath.

Rebecca Nonoo from the Department of Chemistry, Imperial College, winner of the poster presentation prize at the symposium, being presented with her cheque for £100 by Professor Barry Potter from the School of Pharmacy, University of Bath.

Emerging Targets and Treatments: Opportunities and Challenges for Drug Design

Annual One-Day Meeting on Medicinal Chemistry of SRC & KVCV

Het Pand, Ghent - November 25, 2011

www.medchem.be (Contact: LD Organisation Scientific Conference Producers, secretariat@ldorganisation.com)

The Medicinal Chemistry Divisions of the two Belgian Chemical Societies, "Koninklijke Vlaamse Chemische Vereniging (KVCV)" and "Société Royale de Chimie (SRC)" are organizing every year an international one day symposium in Belgium, with the aim to update interested participants on selected areas of pharmaceutical research by specialists in their respective field.

In recent years, this symposium has been focusing on topics such as “Does size matter? Beyond small molecule therapeutics: challenges and success stories“ (2009), “Small molecules, Antibodies and Natural Products: Multiple Faces of Medicinal Chemistry” (2008); “New Drugs and Drug Candidates: Recent Achievements in Medicinal Chemistry (2007)”; "Personalized Medicine: New Opportunities for Drug Discovery (2006)", or "Targeting the Brain: Successes and Pitfalls (2005)", and has been gathering every year around 170 to 200 participants, half from universities, half from industry, both from Belgium and surrounding countries.

This year's symposium with six invited lectures and three oral communications is scheduled to be held on Friday November 25, 2011, at the conference centre “Het Pand” in Ghent and will be chaired by Prof. Serge Van Calenbergh (UGent). The title and focus of the symposium will be “Emerging Targets and Treatments: Opportunities and Challenges for Drug Design”.

Confirmed Speakers to date

• Translocator protein as a promising target for novel anxiolytics
  Prof. Federico DA SETTIMO
  (UNIVERSITÀ DI PISA, Pisa, Italy)
• Drug to Genome to Drug: Discovery of New Antiplasmodial Compounds
  Prof. Benoit DEPREZ
  (UNIVERSITÉ DE LILLE 2, Lille, France)
• Selective Androgen Modulators (SARM) for the Treatment of Cachexia
  Mr Pierre DEPREZ
  (GALAPAGOS, ROMAINVILLE, France)
• Therapeutic Targeting of Toll-like Receptors
  Dr Brian KEOGH
  (OPSONA THERAPEUTICS LTD, Dublin 8, Ireland)
• Targeting GSK-3 with ATP Non-Competitive Inhibitors: From the Bench to the Clinical Trials
  Prof. Ana MARTINEZ
  (INSTITUTO DE QUIMICA MEDICA-CSIC, Madrid, Spain)
• New targets for the treatment of HIV
  Dr David PRYDE
  (PFIZER GLOBAL R&D, Sandwich, United Kingdom)

• September 9, 2011: Division of Medicinal Chemistry, oral and poster session at the Fall Meeting of the Swiss Chemical Society, EPFL, Lausanne.
• September 13, 2012: Division of Medicinal Chemistry, oral and poster session at the Fall Meeting of the Swiss Chemical Society, ETH Zürich, Zürich.
• A half-day mini-symposium at the University of Basel in May 2012 (the exact date and topic of the event will be announced).
  

• November 20-23, 2011: “1st Fall School on Medicinal Chemistry”, Fátima, Portugal. The Medicinal Chemistry Group of the Portuguese Chemical Society will run the first Fall School on Medicinal Chemistry ever held in Portugal, to celebrate the UN International Year of Chemistry 2011. It will cover a range of key topics in drug discovery and translational research related to cancer and neurodegenerative diseases and targets scientists from academia and pharmaceutical industry, as well as Ph.D. students.
• November, 2012: Third National Meeting on Medicinal Chemistry (ENQT3), Aveiro University, Portugal. The third edition of the now traditional National Meeting on Medicinal Chemistry will take place in the University of Aveiro.