11.30  Dr Alexander Boddy:  Rapid Assembly of Saturated Nitrogen Heterocycles in One-Pot for  Biological Screening Collections

11.45  Dr Abel Tesfai:  Metabolic Profiling of Amino Acids Reveal a Potential Link between Taurine and Survival in Sepsis

12noon  Main Visiting Speaker – Professor David Spring:  Enriching Chemical Space to Drug Undruggable Targets

Abstract

The pharmaceutical industry is an enormously successful busiess sector.  However, the current challenges facing the industry are unprecedented .  A high attrition rate of clinical candidates (ca.93-96%) is prevalent throughout the industry.  My talk aims to highlight some of the underlying factors of this. Namely, (1) the relative lack of structural diversity and (2) the relative lack of targets exploited in drug discovery.  The talk will include recent research within my laboratory aimed at addressing these issues.

Biography

David Spring is currently a full Professor at the University of Cambridge within the Chemistry Department.  He received his DPhil (1998) at Oxford University under Sir Jack Baldwin.  He then worked as a Wellcome Trust Postdoctoral Fellow at Harvard University with Stuart Schreiber (1999-2001), after which he joined the faculty at the University of Cambridge.  His research programme is focused on the use of chemistry to explore biology.

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