In 2009, EFMC launched a series of short courses aimed to favour cultural and scientific growth of the medicinal chemistry community and organised with affordable fees for participation. Topic of the 5th Course will be "Target Selection through Application of Chemical and Systems Biology".

This intensive course is intended for scientists working in the field, and the presentations will be given by senior scientists from industry. The number of participants will be limited to 35, to favour in depth discussion. Should the number of applications exceed the maximum, preference will be given to applicants from EFMC adhering countries and employees of EFMC corporate members. Upon special request to the organizers (only based on financial conditions and supported by an argued recommendation of the head of the department of the applicant) a limited number (maximum 3) applicants from academia may be admitted at a reduced fee.

Course Outline
In recent years drug discovery shifted from a traditional target-based approach towards phenotype and patient-based approaches. This course will discuss how systems biology contributes to a better understanding of human physiology and diseases (session I) and of the cellular biological systems behind (session II). This understanding is key for the discovery of novel drugs in order to address the right targets and biological mechanism.  In addition experimental (and computational) approaches to target identification will be a topic (session III), which are key for de-convolution of the molecular target(s) of known drugs or of hits from phenotypic screens (e.g. chemical proteomics). The last session will then describe how ‘omics data can be used to identify signatures of diseases (e.g. gene expression signature) and how these signatures can foster the understanding of a disease-phenotype. These disease signatures can be mapped to signatures of drugs for modern drug discovery.  Each of the four sessions of the course will be introduced by an overview, followed by several case studies and some hands-on exercises using various modelling tools.

To read the full description of the course, please follow this link.

Course Organisers
Thomas Klabunde (Sanofi-Aventis, Germany) 
Brian Harms (Merrimack Pharma, US)
Henk Timmerman (VU University Amsterdam, The Netherlands)