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 "PET & Imaging : From Chemistry Lab to Clinical Applications" (2016); "New Vistas in GPCR Research: the Dawn of an Exciting Drug Discovery Era?" (2014); “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 2017, with six invited lectures and three oral communications, will be held on Friday December 1, 2017, in Leuven. The title and focus of the symposium will be “The Many Pharmacotherapeutic Faces of Nucleosides and Oligonucleotides”.
The objective of the one-day symposium is to delve into the latest developments of the applications of nucleosides, nucleotides and nucleic acids in medicinal chemistry. The applications where situated in the past mainly in the fields of antivirals, anticancer compounds and antisense oligonucleotides. More recently, new therapeutic applications in for example immune-oncology, and the discovery of new functions of nucleic acids in the cell such as siRNA, Crispr/Cas together with new breakthroughs in in vitro selection technologies (XNA aptamers), have revived the field and have opened many new possibilities for drug design. The present knowledge in these different research areas will be presented during the symposium.
