FROM LOW AFFINITY FRAGMENTS INTO POTENT LEADS

PANEL DISCUSSION
Fragments to Drugs

Moderator: Adrian Whitty, Ph.D., Director, Physical Biochemistry, Department of Drug Discovery, Biogen Idec, Inc.

The panel will discuss what can be learned from industry experience to date in advancing fragment hits to bona fide leads and drug candidates. The discussion will address questions such as:

What approaches have proven more or less successful for identifying and validating the most advanceable fragment hits?

What does a good fragment hit look like?

To what extent (if at all) does a fragment-based approach to lead ID provide an entree into new chemical or IP space?

In what ways are prospects for advancing fragment hits to drugs better or worse than for conventional HTS hits?

What is industry experience in applying fragment-based lead ID to less druggable targets, and what have we learned about protein druggability from the application of these methods?

Panelists:
Daniel A. Erlanson, Ph.D. Associate Director, Medicinal Chemistry, Sunesis Pharmaceuticals, Inc.

Lance Stewart, Ph.D., President, Biostructures, deCODE Chemistry & Biostructures

Title TBD

Wolfgang Jahnke, Ph.D., Senior Research Investigator, Novartis Institutes for Biomedical Research

CASE STUDIES

Fragment-based Lead Generation at AstraZeneca: Philosophy, Strategy and Some Case Studies
Alex Breeze, Ph.D., Principal Scientist, Global Structural Chemistry, AstraZeneca

Fragment-based Drug Design of AT13387 - A Novel and Efficacious Inhibitor of Hsp90
Andrew Woodhead, Ph.D., Senior Chemist, Chemistry, Astex Therapeutics

Discovery of Novel Protein Kinase Inhibitors Using Fragment-based Screening
David Williams, Ph.D., Vice President, Biology & Structural Sciences, Sareum Ltd.

Title TBD
Stephen K. Burley, M.D., D.Phil., Chief Scientific Officer, SGX Pharmaceuticals, Inc.

Experiences in Fragment-based Discovery
Roderick Hubbard, Ph.D., Senior Fellow, Research, Vernalis (R&D) Ltd.

PANEL DISCUSSION

Where Are the Techniques Now?

Moderator: Stephen K. Burley, M.D., D.Phil., Chief Scientific Officer, SGX Pharmaceuticals, Inc.

HIT TO LEAD

NMR Spectroscopy in Hit Identification and Optimization Process and Reverse Chemical Genetics
Maurizio Pellecchia, Ph.D., Professor, IIDC and CC, Burnham Institute for Medical Research

Fragments of LifeTM (FOL) for Lead Identification and Optimization
Lance Stewart, Ph.D., President, Biostructures, deCODE Chemistry & Biostructures

COMPUTATIONAL TECHNIQUES

Structure-based Prediction of Small Molecule Druggability
Alan Cheng, Ph.D., Staff Scientist, Modeling Group, Amgen Inc.

Using Pharmacophore Queries and Electrostatic Maps to Retrieve Fragment Linker Groups and Scaffold Replacements in Drug Discovery
Chris Williams, Ph.D., Principal Scientist, Chemical Computing Group Inc.

Docking of Small Molecule Inhibitors at the Interfaces of the Bcl-Xl, MDM2 and Il-2 Proteins
Volkhard Helms, Ph.D., Chair of Computational Biology, Center for Bioinformatics, University of Saarland

Ligand Placement into Electron Density Using PrimeX
Jeffrey A. Bell, PrimeX Product Manager, Schrödinger Inc.