Uppsala University provide a new perspective on computational chemistry tools at Drug Design 2015

SOUTHWARK, U.K. - Nov. 21, 2014 - PRLog -- As science and technology is advancing, drug design has moved from traditional methods to advanced methods such as computer aided drug designing and computational techniques. Advances and Progress in Drug Design 2015 will aim to provide progressive insights on the recent developments and growth drivers in the drug design arena.

This conference will feature over 15 case study driven presentations, speakers representing both industry and academia, an interactive workshop, a panel debate plus over 3 hours of networking.

Highlights this year will include an address from the Senior Researcher of the Computational and Systems Biology Division from Uppsala University, Dr Hugo Gutierrez de Teran. The presentation entitled: Predicting protein structure, ligand binding and receptor selectivity on GPCRs, will discuss the recent upgrade of the GPCR-ModSim web server to account for novel templates and modelling strategies, computational protocols to investigate GPCRs and provide updates in recent applications on the adenosine receptors family.

Dr de Gutierrez de Teran, who will also be chairing the 14^th annual conference, said:

“As a chair of this conference, it is my pleasure to present a comprehensive list of speakers that represent the cutting-edge science of drug design, both from the pharmaceutical and the academic environments, but most importantly representing many times successful stories of collaboration between the two environments.”

“I will contribute to this exciting panel presenting the latest implementations and applications of our computational pipeline for the ligand design of G-protein coupled receptors, which represent the major family of receptor targets for drug design. I will demonstrate of how accurate computational estimations of ligand affinity can be used to elucidate the effects of protein mutations and receptor selectivity’s with our easy-to-use, semi-automated protocols.”

On what he believed attendees will take away from his talk, he commented:

“A new perspective on using accurate and advanced computational chemistry tools, which combine high accuracy and efficiency in detecting the effect of point mutations to ligand binding with easy-to use and semi-automated protocols, so demanded by the pharmaceutical sector.”

When asked about the line-up of speakers presenting next February, he said:

As a GPCR-researcher I always enjoy presentations by Heptares, and this time UCB will also present results from their GPCR program. As a computational chemist, the topics covered by these two talks plus the J&J and Bender (Cambridge University) talks are warranted to be really interesting. Finally, the fragment-based approaches are gaining more and more interest in the field and I look forward to hear the latest advances in the field.

The full interview is available to read in the downloads tab at http://www.smi-online.co.uk/goto/2015drug-design61.asp (http://www.smi-online.co.uk/goto/2015drug-design60.asp)

Advances & Progress in Drug Design

16th - 17th March 2015
Marriott Regents Park Hotel, London, UK
www.drug-design.co.uk
Sponsored by Chemical Computing Group

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