8th EFMC Short Course on Medicinal Chemistry
Engineering of Biopharmaceuticals

This intensive course is intended for scientists with interests in the field of peptide and protein engineering covering interesting topics around synthetic peptides, engineered proteins and therapeutic antibodies. The number of participants will be limited to 35 to assure the possibility for in-depth discussions. The presentations and tutorials will be given by academic and industrial experts in the various topics and will cover broad historical perspectives and in depth details of important engineering technologies. The presenters will also include interesting applications as well as future aspects in an informal approach aiming for high level of interaction of the participants.

Course outline
The development of future biopharmaceuticals will depend on research at the interfaces between several scientific disciplines including organic chemistry, physical chemistry, biophysics, protein chemistry and molecular biology. The interplay between these fields will have a key role for improving our molecular understanding of peptides and proteins and thus for developing future drug candidates. This course will focus on strategies on how to design and engineer biopharmaceuticals and will provide participants with insight to this important field of bioscience, which are applicable in academic and pharmaceutical contexts. The course will cover several fundamental aspects of peptide chemistry methodologies, selective modifications of proteins, ligation chemistries and regioselective coupling reactions. The biophysical characterization of peptide and proteins will be integrated in the lectures. The course will also cover various methods of semi-synthetic and synthetic modifications of proteins with focus on the application to drug discovery. Finally the course will give an insight to therapeutic antibodies including screening, optimization an engineering aspects.

Thus, various issues of development of biopharmaceuticals as well as discussions of different strategies to improve peptide and protein properties to biopharmaceuticals will be the primary focus of the course.

Course Organiser
Jesper LAU (Novo Nordisk, Denmark)

Local Organiser
Henk TIMMERMAN (VU University Amsterdam, The Netherlands)