News and Events
Supporting new approaches to drug discovery
13 May 2004
On May 20-21, a workshop will be held at the University of Cambridge to encourage academics and industrial partners to support a multi-disciplinary new approach to drug discovery.
The workshop is hosted by the Next Generation Drug Discovery Community, an initiative recently created by the Cambridge-MIT Institute. It brings together researchers from Cambridge University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) to work on tackling the bottlenecks that are slowing the development of new drugs.
Leaders of the initiative will give an update on their current work in stem-cell research and drug discovery to academics and representatives from the pharmaceutical, biotechnology and information technology industries. Those attending will be encouraged to join the Community, and pool their skills in a new approach to tackling complex diseases, such as cancers and diabetes.
The Next Generation Drug Discovery Community firmly believes that it is vital to move away from the current 'one gene, one protein, one drug' approach, and share a wide range of skills to speed up new drug discovery.
Speakers will include Dr Bertie Gottgens, from the Cambridge Institute for Medical Research, and Professor Linda Griffith from MIT's Department of Biological Engineering, who will talk about their research into adult blood stem cells, and whether they can establish new experimental systems to test the efficacy and toxicity of drugs on human physiology. Other speakers will discuss the genetics of Type 1 diabetes, and the challenges of establishing new, computational methods by which drug targets can be identified from human gene- and protein-level data.
Professor Peter Landshoff, the lead Principal Investigator on the Cambridge team, said:
�It is a time of great opportunity to bring together disciplines including not only biology and medicine, but also mathematics, statistics, computer science, physics and management.�
For further information, or to register for a place, please contact Dr Karen Smith: ks390@cam.ac.uk
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