Session Chairs:
Harren Jhoti, Astex Therapeutics Ltd., United Kingdom
Kendall Nettles, The Scripps Research Institute, USA
The use of structure-based drug design methods in the discovery of novel lead compounds has grown significantly in the last decade. This has been largely due to technology advances in structural biology that allow scientists to obtain protein/ligand structures in a timely manner to guide medicinal chemistry. As a consequence lead optimization programs are now able to more efficiently generate drug candidates with the desired properties. Furthermore, high-throughput methods in crystallography and NMR have also allowed structure-based methods to establish new approaches for lead generation, such as fragment-based discovery. This session will outline some of the key technology advances in structural biology and illustrate their application for structure-based lead generation and optimization.