EFMC Meetings
In 2007, EFMC will be involved in three major Medicinal Chemistry Events in Europe.
- The Austrian-German-Hungarian-Italian-Polish-Slovenian Joint Meeting on Medicinal Chemistry, organised by the Section for Medicinal Chemistry of the Slovenian Pharmaceutical Society in June in Portoroz continues the tradition started 1999 in Taormina, bringing together scientists from eastern and western Europe.
- The ASMC 07 meeting in St. Petersburg follows the very successful event in Moscow 2004, focusing on Synthetic and Medicinal Chemistry.
- Last but not least, the Division of Medicinal Chemistry of the Italian Chemical Society hosts the first event jointly organised by the ACS-Division of Medicinal Chemistry and EFMC, which will take place in October in Siena and will focus on oncology and neurodegenerative diseases.
Please have also a look on the conference report for the XIXth International Symposium on Medicinal Chemistry, Istanbul 2006, written by Erden Banoglu.
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5th Joint Meeting on Medicinal Chemistry
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Advances in Synthetic and Medicinal Chemistry
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Frontiers in CNS and Oncology Medicinal Chemistry
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Conference Report
XIXth International Symposium on Medicinal Chemistry (EFMC-ISMC 2006)
Istanbul, August 29-September 2, 2006
As the main event of European Federation of Medicinal Chemistry (EFMC) in 2006, the 19th of the biennial International Symposia on Medicinal Chemistry (ISMC2006) was hosted by the Turkish Association of Pharmaceutical and Medicinal Chemistry in the historical city of Istanbul which bridges two continents with memories from many past civilizations.
The Scientific Organizing Committee welcomed over 900 scientists from different European nations and the USA in the elegant Lutfi Kýrdar Convention Center localized in the heart of Istanbul.
The opening of the symposium was done by Trevor Jones with his interesting inaugural talk on the future of medicines research and the pharmaceutical industry in Europe in which he emphasized medicinal chemistry as the core discipline for understanding diseases and discovering new therapeutics.
During the symposium three plenary lectures on medicinal chemistry related sciences namely chemical genetics, systems biology and the control of GPCR-mediated signal transduction were introduced to the participants.
- Kevin Shokat from UCSF presented the significance of combining chemistry and genetics to overcome the lack of information provided by traditional genetic studies.
- Prof. Van der Greef of TNO Systems Biology gave an overview of systems biology as an emerging tool for medicinal chemists and its impact on the pharmaceutical discovery and development process using correlation network approaches.
- Last but not least, Prof. Milligan from University of Glasgow presented novel and selective targets for drug design identified by proteomic technologies.
Additionally, three prestigious EFMC awards traditionally conferred by EFMC every two years were presented by the EFMC president Prof. Pellicciari and the representatives of each award sponsoring institutions.
- This year, the winner of the “Nauta Award for Pharmacochemistry” was Prof. Philip Portoghese who has contributed from various distinct directions to the field of GPCR science.
- The “UCB Award for Excellence in Medicinal Chemistry” was granted to Dr. Bernd Riedl from Bayer AG on the basis of his discovery of the raf-kinase inhibitor sorafenib, an anti-cancer drug that is now on the market.
- The "Prous Science Award for New Technologies in Drug Discovery" was given to Prof. Dario Neri at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) on the basis of his pioneering work establishing synthetic antibody libraries employing phage display technology.
- Additionally, ISMC2006 for the first time hosted the presentation of the GSK Award on Chemical Biology (to Prof. Waldmann) and the IUPAC-Richter Prize in Medicinal Chemistry (to Prof. Stevens).
Furthermore, in 30 parallel sessions comprised of 29 key lectures, 61 lectures and 30 short communications, many other aspects of medicinal chemistry were covered with the additional 388 poster presentations from participants.
In summary, the 19th International Symposium on Medicinal Chemistry in Istanbul 2006 was a scientifically and socially very rewarding event providing the participants an exchange of information and establishing personal contacts in a fabulous surrounding of Istanbul. All participants are very grateful to the organizing committee for the very attractive social program. The President of the Turkish Society and the chairman of the ISMC2006, Prof. Ţahin and the author of this short report wish to our successors a successful organization for the 20th EFMC-ISMC, which will be held in Vienna in 2008.
Erden Banoglu
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