News
Course Material on Best Practices in Medicinal Chemistry
Wondering how researchers work in other companies or in academia? Are there important trends or new technologies that you may have missed? Looking for general guidelines or tips and tricks on important topics in drug discovery?
EFMC is tackling this challenge with a team of experienced practitioners from industry and academia, and is sharing training and course materials in several formats: freely accessible webinars on the EFMC youtube channel, educational slide decks and case studies.
These are freely accessible for personal use or for use in further training or teaching material, so have a look and spread the news!
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Validating Chemical Probes
What are chemical probes and why are they important? Chemical probes are designed to selectively address a biological question; this is distinctly different from a drug, which is designed to produce a clinical outcome! Simple guidelines can be used to generate high-quality chemical probes and obtain reliable data to further our understanding of human biology and disease.
- Phenotypic Drug Discovery (PDD)
Recent years have seen a renaissance of Phenotypic drug discovery (PPD) with novel screening technologies and a track record that is thought to match or surpass that of target-centric approaches. We present a view on best practices to consider when running phenotypic drug discovery campaigns to increase the chance of success of these black box approachs.
- Hit Generation
Hit Generation is a crucial step of all drug discovery campaigns that will determine the speed and chance of success of identifying drug candidates.
We cover the essential approaches for hit generation and the opportunities and challenges they come with. We then provide guidance on how to validate hits to ensure medicinal chemistry is only performed on compounds and scaffolds that engage the target of interest and have the desired mode of action. Finally, we discuss the design of integrated hit generation strategies that combine several approaches to maximize the chance of identifying high quality starting points.