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Duncan the CEO of Awridian Ltd will be attending BOS2023 on 28th and 29th November, Manchester Central! He will be chairing a session entitled: OUTSOURCING CASE STUDIES ay 11.30 on the 29th. Look forward to seeing you there.

https://www.bio2bevents.com/bosmanchester2023

Duncan will be attending the SMR RSC RECENT TRENDS IN MEDICINAL CHEMISTRY AND ENABLING TECHNOLOGIES to be held Friends House, 173-177 Euston Road, London NW1 2BJ, on 8th Dec 2022.

This will be a combination of medicinal chemistry, chemistry-based drug discovery enabling technologies and chemical biology from academic, industry and not-for-profit groups.

The meeting will be primarily focused on talks from UK groups to reflect the breadth of work taking place across the UK to advance our understanding and prosecution of targets, technologies and lead series to underpin medicines research.

Hope to see you there!

The CEO of Awridian Ltd attended the ELRIG Conference and Trade show held at London’s ExCel centre in Oct 2022. There was a good range of presentation and exhibitors. The poster session was also a highlight.

An overview from the SMR:

Currently neither traditional Pharma nor big tech companies have the full end-to-end capabilities to compete effectively in the future healthcare market alone, which has led to an evident and significant increase in their partnerships. These partnership aims to exploit the many new scientific breakthroughs, to empower consumers to take control of their own health, to increase development of personalised therapies, to speed up drug discovery and ultimately decrease the healthcare cost at the global level.

Despite the promise of many benefits for these partnerships, the industry must proceed with caution. The speed of technological innovation means that regulation and monitoring can struggle to keep pace. This could potentially jeopardise patients’ confidentiality, genetic privacy and even their health.

A panel of experts from industry, CROs, medical charities and VCs will share some of their experiences and lessons learned on how these institutions have developed strategies to deal with this evolving landscapes.

A very informative day.

The ‘Hatfield Chemistry’ meeting which returned on Thursday, 28th April 2022 at the Fielder Centre, Hatfield UK. It was great to be there, an excellent conference with excellent presentations, and importantly the chance for networking.

The CEO of Awridian will be attended this SMR meeting on Monday 21st March 2022 at the Francis Crick Institute in London UK .

Here is an interesting and useful paper entitled, COCONUT online: Collection of Open Natural Products database. A paper on the topic can be found at https://doi.org/10.1186/s13321-020-00478-9

Whilst access for the database is at Natural Products Online.

A paper on Building Block Design (RECAP analysis) has reached 500 citations. For me, an endorsement of this pivotal publication.

Back in the last millennium, High Throughput Chemistry was wrestling with how to make appropriate compounds for High Throughput Screening. At the time commercially available starting materials were limited to chemical intermediates, used in various industrial processes. Although a pragmatic source, they did not reflect what was required to generate appropriate leads for drug discovery. To address this lack of design we established a method based on known drug molecules – RECAP. The reason for highlighting this paper now is it has just reached a landmark of 500 citations in the literature. RECAP has been used in a variety of ways, building blocks, fragment libraries, toxicology studies, to see the original text:  

RECAP Retrosynthetic Combinatorial Analysis Procedure:  A Powerful New Technique for Identifying Privileged Molecular Fragments with Useful Applications in Combinatorial Chemistry https://doi.org/10.1021/ci970429i J. Chem. Inf. Comput. Sci. 1998, 38, 3, 511–522

My thanks goes out to my co-workers: Xiao Qing Lewell, Stephen P. Watson, and Michael M. Hann

Unfortunately the 31st Symposium on Medicinal chemistry in Eastern England to beheld at Hatfield on 30 April 2020 has been postponed until November. The Symposium on Medicinal Chemistry in Eastern England, known colloquially as the “Hatfield MedChem” meeting, is a highly successful, long-standing, one-day meeting which runs annually. The scientific program will comprise presentations showcasing medicinal chemistry case studies from tools to candidates, across a range of modalities, therapeutic areas and target classes, as well as covering more general topics from the forefront of drug discovery of relevance to medicinal chemists.

Duncan is pleased to announce that he has joined the EOSnetwork, a charitable organisation focusing on eosinophilic diseases, as a Scientific Research and Drug Development Advisor please take a look at: www.eosnetwork.org

Eosinophilic diseases are not well understood, probably the best characterised is eosinophilic esophagitis which was first described in children but also occurs in adults. It is thought that food allergy may play a significant role. The treatment may consist of removal of known or suspected triggers and medication to suppress the immune response. Take a look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eosinophilic_esophagitis