Upcoming events
Infectious Disease and Drug Discovery
Friday, June 20, 2008
Register
now! (registration:
$100)
Three decades ago, many people
considered infectious diseases to be an area of medicine
that was "under control". Medications were
available to treat most bacterial infections and
vaccination programs had successfully eradicated
smallpox and many assumed these successes would continue
well into the future. Today, there are strains of
bacteria resistant to most or all common therapies,
including Stapholococcus aureas, Streptococcus
pneumoniae, M. tuberculosis and others.
Numerous new agents responsible for disease have been
identified in the last 30 years, including HIV (AIDS),
Hepatitis C virus and Borrelia burgdorferi (Lyme
disease). Infectious diseases now have significant unmet
medical need.
Structural biology has played a
significant role in understanding bacterial and viral
protein targets and in designing inhibitors for those
targets. Academic laboratories routinely use biophysical
methods to understand the biological mechanisms of
bacteria and viruses. Early work with HIV protease
showed the potential power of structure based drug
design, and pharmaceutical companies routinely use NMR
and X-ray crystallography in drug discovery and compound
optimization. Work is needed by both academic and
industrial laboratories to understand the biology of and
develop the drugs necessary to treat and prevent
infectious disease. This symposium will bring together
researchers from industry and academia to discuss their
work in this important field.
If you are interested in participating or would like to be a presenter,
please contact one of the organizers: Harmon Zuccola
and Ann Boriack-Sjodin.
|
