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Thursday, November 29, 2012

Medicinal chemists receive 20 million euro grant to optimize drug binding kinetics

 Medicinal chemists receive 20 million euro grant to optimize drug binding kinetics

 In order for newly developed drugs to be used for treating people, these drugs have to pass certain tests to prove their efficiency. Often, the drugs are tested in labs to see if they work in lab experiments; if they succeed, they move on to clinical trials. If they are very successful in treating patients in these trials, then the drugs have a good chance of becoming legal in medicine. However, many drugs that seem successful in lab experiments do not succeed in clinical studies due to lack of effectiveness. There is mounting evidence that binding kinetics - the time a drug remains bound to its pharmaceutically relevant protein target - may be of greater importance for its effect in the patient than its binding affinity. The K4DD consortium, including medicinal chemists Iwan de Esch, Chris de Graaf, Martine Smit, and Rob Leurs, started last week to tackle this problem.
K4DD
The K4DD consortium is financially supported by Europe’s Innovative Medicines Initiative (IMI) programme and major pharmaceutical companies. "The 20 partners are the key players in their fields: world-leaders in medicinal chemistry and molecular pharmacology, involved in the structural elucidation of drug targets, and at the forefront of computational modeling and bio-analytical techniques. This ensemble of technologies allows the study of the drug-target interaction from the very first picoseconds to the eventual times of treatment."
K4DD IMI
The K4DD research consortium is funded by the Innovative Medicines Initiative (IMI), a joint undertaking between the European Union and the pharmaceutical industry association EFPIA.
Division of Medicinal Chemistry
Within the Division of Medicinal Chemistry of the Amsterdam Institute for Molecules, Medicines and Systems, funding of 825.000 euro will allow the development of new techniques to measure binding kinetics, as well as better understanding them. With this new understanding, scientists believe that K4DD will be able to create new drugs with "improved kinetic profiles," thus allowing the drugs to be more effective in clinical trials, allowing them to become official medicines.
For more information, visit  http://www.aimms.vu.nl/en/news-events/news-archive/2012/20-million-euro-grant-to-optimize-drug-binding-kinetics.asp

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