The Medicinal Chemistry Divisions of the two Belgian Chemical Societies, Société Royale de Chimie (SRC) and the Koninklijke Vlaamse Chemische Vereniging (KVCV), are organising every year an international one day symposium in Belgium, with the aim to update participants on selected areas of pharmaceutical research by specialists in their respective field.
In recent years, this symposium has been gathering every year around 170 participants, half from universities, half from industry, both from Belgium and surrounding countries. It has been focussing on topics such as “Constrained Peptides and Macrocycles – New Opportunities for Drug Discovery” (2013); “From Rapid Dissociation to Irreversible Inhibition – Optimisation of Drug-Target Residence Time” (2012); “Emerging Targets and Treatments: Opportunities and Challenges for Drug Design” (2011); “Does size matter? Beyond small molecule therapeutics: challenges and success stories“ (2009); “Small molecules, Antibodies and Natural Products: Multiple Faces of Medicinal Chemistry” (2008); or “New Drugs and Drug Candidates: Recent Achievements in Medicinal Chemistry (2007)”.
MedChem 2014, with six invited lectures and three oral communications, will be held on Friday November 21, 2014, at UCB in Braine-L'Alleud. The title and focus of the symposium will be “New Vistas in GPCR Research: the Dawn of an Exciting Drug Discovery Era?”.
The purpose of this one day symposium is to delve into some of the latest developments in GPCR drug discovery. Following the elucidation of a growing number of GPCR’s structures over the past few years, and the increased understanding of the complexity of the receptor-ligand interactions, the way GPCR ligands are discovered and designed has entered a new era. A sightseeing tour covering GPCR structural biology advances, state-of-the-art experimental and computational technologies for hit discovery and medicinal chemistry case studies for ‘classical’ and allosteric GPCR programs will be presented.
