Symposium to debate protease progress
Fine Chemicals Group: Proteinase 2006: Challenges in medicinal chemistry, 22-23 May 2006, London, UK
 Proteolytic enzymes have crucial roles in disease progression and in regulating physiological processes. Consequently, the academic community and pharmaceutical industry have invested considerable effort into understanding the structure and function of proteases to enable the design of safe and effective therapeutic inhibitors. Modern techniques and technologies such as fragment screening and structure-based drug design have been embraced to accelerate the discovery of protease inhibitors. Significant progress has been made but the delivery of drugs remains a difficult challenge.
‘Proteinase 2006: challenges in medicinal chemistry’ represents the fifth in a series of collaborative SCI-Royal Society of Chemistry meetings dedicated to the subject of proteases. It will cover recent progress in the design and synthesis of aspartic, serine, cysteine and metallo protease inhibitors. The importance of protease enzymes in a number of biological pathways means that blocking these molecular targets can be used to treat a wide variety of disease indications. Some of the topics that will be covered in the meeting include the discovery of the renin inhibitor Aliskiren, β-secretase inhibitors targeting Alzheimer’s, TAFIa inhibitors for the treatment of thrombosis, NS3/4A inhibitors to block the replication of the hepatitis C virus and cathepsin K inhibitors to counteract osteoporosis. Plenary lectures will be given by John Kay (Cardiff University) on aspartic proteases and Martin Stahl (Roche) on the structure-based drug design of serine proteases.
Historically, the SCI-RSC proteinase conference has been aimed at scientists interested in furthering their knowledge of proteases. This year’s meeting will have wider appeal to any medicinal chemist eager to understand how drug discovery programmes are implemented in different environments across the pharmaceutical sector. The symposium always provides fertile discussion between delegates, answers questions and presents the future challenges in the area of protease inhibition.
Stephen East
Fine Chemicals Group
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