MedChem 2012 - From Rapid Dissociation to Irreversible Inhibition
Optimisation of Drug-Target Residence Time

Koen Augustyns is currently full professor of medicinal chemistry at the University of Antwerp (UA), Belgium. He obtained his master in pharmaceutical sciences in 1988 at the K.U.Leuven, Belgium and a PhD in medicinal chemistry in 1992 at the Rega Institute of the same university under the supervision of Prof. Piet Herdewijn. After postdoctoral stays at the University of Antwerp, Belgium and as A. Von Humboldt fellow at the University of Tübingen, Germany he was appointed professor of medicinal chemistry in 1997 in Antwerp. He is president of the Medicinal and Bioorganic Chemistry Division of the Royal Flemish Chemical Society (KVCV), secretary of the European Federation for Medicinal Chemistry (EFMC), chair of the Department of Pharmaceutical Sciences (UA) and member of several scientific and organizing committees of international symposia, e.g. ISMC 2010 in Brussels, Belgium. His main research interest is the design, synthesis and characterization of inhibitors and chemical probes targeting enzymes, with a special focus on irreversible protease inhibitors.

Andrew Hopkins' research is focused on developing novel methods to improve drug discovery, such as automating drug design. His group at the University of Dundee, College of Life Sciences, consists of an informatics team and biosensor lab. After completing his doctoral research in structural biology and drug design at the University of Oxford in 1998, Andrew Hopkins joined Pfizer where he designed major informatics systems to aid drug discovery and developed several important concept that have been widely adopted by the medicinal chemistry community, including the druggable genome, ligand efficiency and polypharmacology.

Prof. Ad IJzerman holds the chair of medicinal chemistry at Leiden University, The Netherlands. He was trained as a pharmacist at Utrecht University and obtained his PhD degree at the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam. His scientific compassion lies with G protein-coupled receptors, the preeminent drug targets of current pharmacotherapy. He and his team have pioneered novel concepts of drug action on these membrane-bound proteins, such as constitutive activity/inverse agonism, allosteric modulation and, more recently, residence time. This was done mostly on one or more of the four adenosine receptor subtypes. He also contributed to the structure elucidation of one of these, the adenosine A2A receptor, quite a hallmark since membrane-bound proteins are usually hard to crystallize.

Dr. Gregor Macdonald graduated with a B.Sc. (Hons.) degree in Organic Chemistry from Edinburgh University in 1992, before joining the Wellcome Foundation in London within the Medicinal Chemistry department. In 1994, he moved to the University of York where he obtained his Ph.D. in natural product synthesis in 1997. Between 1997 and 2004, he worked for SmithKline Beecham and then GlaxoSmithKline, playing a prominent role in leading discovery programs within both the Psychiatry and Neurology disease areas. In 2004, Dr. Macdonald joined Janssen Pharmaceutica in Belgium, to lead the Psychiatry 1 Medicinal Chemistry team and then later the combined Psychiatry group. During this period, he co-led the discovery program aimed at identifying Fast Dissociating D2 antagonists for the treatment of schizophrenia, resulting in the identification of JNJ37822681. Since 2007, Dr. Macdonald has headed the Neuroscience Medicinal Chemistry team in Europe, leading teams in Beerse (Belgium) and Toledo (Spain) in the identification of several clinical candidates from the Janssen mGluR and PDE programs, together with supporting significant research efforts to develop disease modifying treatments for Alzheimer’s disease. Throughout his time within Janssen, Dr. Macdonald has been involved in managing several external drug discovery collaborations, including those with Addex Therapeutics, the Vanderbilt Centre for Neuroscience Drug Discovery and Neurosearch. He is a co-author and co-inventor on over 90 scientific publications and patents and has been an invited speaker at several international conferences.

Dr. Petter is Vice President of Chemistry for Celgene. Dr. Petter has a broad background in organic and medicinal chemistry in both academia and the private sector. In industry he has focused on the discovery and development of therapeutics to treat cancer, cardiovascular disease, and autoimmune disorders. Prior to joining Avila he was VP of Research at Mersana Therapeutics, Director of Small Molecule Drug Discovery at Biogen, Fellow and Head of Chemistry in the Oncology/Adhesion Biology Department at Sandoz/Novartis, and Assistant Professor of Chemistry at the University of Pittsburgh. Dr. Petter earned his PhD in organic chemistry at Duke University and completed his post-doctoral training at Columbia University.

Yogesh obtained a Bachelor’s degree in Pharmaceutical Sciences in 1998 and then took up the position as a Graduate Student at the Department of Medicinal Chemistry, University of Mississippi, USA (1998-2002) working with organic synthesis of heterocyclic compounds and computational drug design. He then went on to successfully complete a Postdoctoral Fellowship at Uppsala University, Sweden at the Department of Medicinal Chemistry (January 2003- August 2006). Deciding to shift into industry, Yogesh joined Pfizer (Sandwich-UK) in Discovery Chemistry as a Computational Chemist. At Pfizer, he had the opportunity to work closely with structure biology, biophysical and primary pharmacology teams, and later on was involved in interfacing between them to design efficient time-dependent screens and screening sequences. In April 2011, Yogesh taught a course on the ‘Importance of Binding Kinetics in Drug Discovery Programs’ at the 3rd EFMC short course in Medicinal Chemistry in Leiden, NL. Yogesh joined the Chemistry Department at UCB in August 2011. He is currently responsible for providing successful compound design through the application and development of novel computational tools and is also responsible for leading an early project on various neurological diseases. Yogesh has 25 published articles in peer reviewed journals, 4 issued patents, and numerous conference presentations.