Archive for the ‘News’ Category

2016 RSC Prizes and Awards in Organic Chemistry & Chemical Biology now open for nomination

The 2016 RSC Prizes and Awards are now open for nomination!

Nominations will close on 15 January 2016.


For more than 140 years, our Prizes and Awards programme has been acknowledging and celebrating exceptional talent in the chemical sciences, and with your support we are hoping that 2016 will even more successful!

Last year’s winners include Chemists such as Prof. Wilfred van der Donk (University of Illinois), Prof. Tim Donohoe (University of Oxford), Prof. Shuli You (Shanghai Institute of Organic Chemistry), Prof. Philip Gale (University of Southampton), Prof. Herman Overkleeft (Leiden University), Prof. Alison Ashcroft and Prof. Sheena Radford (University of Leeds).

This year we have 63 prizes and awards open for nominations of individuals, teams and organisations covering the breadth of the chemical sciences across academia, education and industry.

This year’s prizes in the field of Organic Chemistry & Chemical Biology include:

CBID (Chemistry Biology Interface Division) awards –

Organic Awards –

For 2016 our Longstaff Prize is also open – since 1881 we have awarded this prize once every three years to one of our members who has achieved the most to advance the science of chemistry.

Submit your suggestions now!

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Medicinal Chemistry Toolkit app v2.0 now released

FREE Medicinal Chemistry Toolkit App

Easy to access functions – anytime, anywhere

The Medicinal Chemistry Toolkit App, compatible with iOS devices and optimised for iPad, provides a suite of resources to support the day to day work of a medicinal chemist.

Search the App store forMedicinal Chemistry Toolkit.”

Functions include:
  • Cheng-Prusoff calculator
  • Dose to man calculator
  • Gibbs free energy to binding constant calculator
  • Maximum absorbable dose calculator
  • Potency shift due to plasma protein binding calculator
  • LogD vs pH curves
  • Attrition modeller
  • Drug-drug interaction modeller

Exciting new functionality recently released in v2.0 allows you to draw your own structures and provides direct feedback on  the quality or drug-like nature of your compound and calculates pharmacologically relevant properties (GClogP, ligand efficiency).

The Handbook of Medicinal Chemistry

The app has been designed in collaboration with the editors of The Handbook of Medicinal Chemistry: Principles and Practice, which was published in December 2014 providing a comprehensive, everyday resource for a practicing medicinal chemist throughout the drug development process.

Price: £84.99 – RSC Members receive 35% discount!

Order Now.

Print ISBN: 978-1-84973-625-1

Pages:  788

  • Comprehensive and up-to-date information covering the entire drug development process.
  • Written and edited by experts from academia and industry.
  • Case studies with hints and tips from within the industry allow medicinal chemists to apply academic understanding to drug discovery.

Coming Soon:  interactive electronic format

The Handbook will be published online to allow greater linking to relevant resources. Per chapter download from our publication platform containing additional features, such as links to protein and chemical structures, interactive graphs and downloadable project management templates, will be available soon.

  • PDF eISBN: 978-1-78262-183-6
  • EPUB eISBN: 978-1-78262-419-6
  • DOI: 10.1039/9781782621836
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Malcolm Campbell Memorial Prize winners 2015

The Biological and Medicinal Chemistry Sector of the Royal Society of Chemistry is proud to announce the winners of the Malcolm Campbell Memorial Prize for 2015. The prize has been awarded to Miles Congreve, Fiona Marshall and Malcolm Weir for the seminal contributions to G-protein-coupled receptor (GPCR) drug discovery made by Heptares Therapeutics Ltd since the company was founded in 2007.

This work has included building the world-renowned StaR© technology platform for X-ray crystallography of GPCRs and the invention of a number of clinical candidates. The winners are particularly commended on their outstanding publication record, and on their willingness to release data into the public domain.

The Malcolm Campbell Memorial prize commemorates Professor Campbell’s outstanding contributions in a broad range of chemistry and their applications to the understanding of bioactivity. The prize is awarded biennially and the 2015 prize will be presented formally to the winning team during the 18th RSC/SCI Medicinal Chemistry Symposium to be held at Churchill College in Cambridge on 13th to 16th September 2015.

The BMCS Committee wishes to express its gratitude for the high-quality entries from both academia and industry for the 2015 award.

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In the Pipeline articles from Derek Lowe now featured in MedChemComm

The new year brings a host of new features in MedChemComm. The first of these is that we are now featuring articles by medicinal chemist and blogger Derek Lowe. These articles, which give opinion and insight into both the science and business sides of drug discovery, will be selected from those published in his In the Pipeline column in the Royal Society of Chemistry magazine Chemistry World, bringing this content to a new audience.

Take a look at the first article in issue 1 of MedChemComm, and look out for further announcements about new features in MedChemComm through the year.

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Quinoxalines with biological activity

A recent publication in MedChemComm from Doaa A. E. Issa et al.reports the synthesis and biological properties of a series of compounds containing the quinoxaline pharmacophore. Their choice of the quinoxaline motif was inspired by the antineoplastic and antimicrobial activity of other compounds containing this group.

Issa et al. synthesised a total of 15 compounds via a key hydrazino intermediate and evaluated 10 candidates at a single high dose for antitumour activity in the National Cancer Institute-60 cell screen. Compounds showing activity were further evaluated in a multi-dose assay. The team went on to assess the in vitro antibacterial activity and antifungal properties.

They found that several compounds in the series display antibacterial activity and one compound possesses both broad spectrum anticancer activity and antimicrobial activity against Pseudomonas aeruginosa.

Two examples of bioactive quinoxalines

Design, synthesis and biological evaluation of novel 1,2,4-triazolo and 1,2,4-triazino[4,3-a]quinoxalines as potential anticancer and antimicrobial agents
Doaa A. E. Issa, Nargues S. Habib and Abeer E. Abdel Wahab
Med. Chem. Commun., 2015, DOI: 10.1039/C4MD00257A

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Take 1…minute for chemistry in health

Can you explain the importance of chemistry to human health in just 1 minute? If you’re an early-career researcher who is up to the challenge, making a 1 minute video could win you £500.

The chemical sciences will be fundamental in helping us meet the healthcare challenges of the future, and we are committed to ensuring that they contribute to their full potential. As part of our work in this area, we are inviting undergraduate and PhD students, post-docs and those starting out their career in industry to produce an original video that demonstrates the importance of chemistry in health.

We are looking for imaginative ways of showcasing how chemistry helps us address healthcare challenges. Your video should be no longer than 1 minute, and you can use any approach you like.

The winner will receive a £500 cash prize, with a £250 prize for second place and £150 prize for third place up for grabs too.

Stuck for inspiration? Last year’s winning video is a good place to start. John Gleeson’s video was selected based on the effective use of language, dynamic style, creativity and its accurate content.

The closing date for entries to be submitted is 30 January 2015. Our judging panel will select the top five videos. We will then publish the shortlisted videos online and open the judging to the public to determine the winner and the runners up.

For more details on how to enter the competition and who is eligible, join us at the Take 1… page.

Good luck!

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RSC Organic Division Poster Symposium 2014

RSC Organic Division Poster Symposium 2014, headline sponsored by F. Hoffmann-La Roche, Ltd.

The poster symposium, for final year organic chemistry PhD students, will take place at The Royal Society of Chemistry, Burlington House, London on Monday 01 December 2014.

The symposium offers final year PhD students a chance to showcase their research to their peers, leading academics and industrial chemists, and is open to all branches of organic chemistry. The symposium has a tradition of being the most competitive and highly regarded organic chemistry symposium for PhD students in the UK and ROI and we would like to thank F. Hoffmann-La Roche, Ltd. for their generous support of the event.

There will be a first prize of £500, two runner-up prizes of £250, and a “selected by Industry Prize”. Industrial delegates will make this selection by considering the research’s potential for application in an industrial context; the winner will also receive a prize of £500.

Closing date for submissions is Wednesday 01 October 2014.
For more information and to submit your abstract go to http://rsc.li/organic-poster

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European Federation for Medicinal Chemistry (EFMC) Awards

Every two years the European Federation for Medicinal Chemistry (EFMC), a partner society of MedChemComm, honour three awards at the International Symposium on Medicinal Chemistry (EFMC-ISMC).  Congratulations to the following winners of the EFMCEFMC Awards 2014!

Nauta Award for Pharmacochemistry
Professor Paul Leeson
GlaxoSmithKline, UK

UCB-Ehrlich Award for Excellence in Medicinal Chemistry
Professor Craig Crews
Yale University, Department of Chemistry, New Haven, USA

Prous Institute-Overton and Meyer Award for New Technologies in Drug Discovery
Professor György Ferenczy and Professor György Keseru
Research Centre for Natural Sciences, Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Budapest, Hungary

These awards acknowledge outstanding achievements in the field of Medicinal Chemistry.

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Make your journal work for you

Want to know about the latest research we publish in MedChemComm? Want to be told about upcoming themed issues, or the most read articles, or other journal news?

Here are a few ways you can stay in touch with us and all that is happening:

RSS Feed for MedChemCommMost recent articles

Be informed about the latest articles published on our website by adding us to your RSS Feed.


Issue alerts

Sign-up to MedChemComm issue alertsGet the table of contents of the latest issue of MedChemComm sent direct to you when we publish the issue.


News alerts

Register for MedChemComm news alertsBy joining our news alerts we can let you know about:

  • Up-coming themed collections (print & electronic)
  • Top Ten most accessed articles
  • Changes to our Editorial Board
  • Important news for the journal


Twitter

We can also be found on Twitter @MedChemComm, add us and say hello. MedChemComm twitter


And of course you can always come back to this blog to find out about our journal news.

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Targeting mitochondria with hydrogen sulfide donors

Decreased biosynthesis of hydrogen sulfide is found in a range of disease states. In cell based assays, hydrogen sulfide can prevent oxidant-induced cell damage. Together, these findings suggest that strategies to increase hydrogen sulfide bioavailability may have potential in the treatment of disease states such as hypertension and diabetes.

A recent article published in MedChemComm reports the synthesis of a hydrogen sulfide donor molecule coupled to a triphenylphosphonium cation (AP39).

The effects of this molecule on oxidative stress were compared against a compound with known vasodilatory activity in a cellular model. Lipophilic cation, such as the triphenylphosphonium cation, can accumulate within mitochondria (the main source of detrimental oxidant production within cells). The cytoprotective potency of the synthesised compound was greater than that of the comparator, suggesting that compounds capable of delivering hydrogen sulfide to mitochondria may have therapeutic potential.

AP39 [(10-oxo-10-(4-(3-thioxo-3H-1,2-dithiol-5-yl)- phenoxy)decyl)triphenylphosphonium bromide] a mitochondria-targeted hydrogen sulfide donor

The synthesis and functional evaluation of a mitochondria-targeted hydrogen sulfide donor, (10-oxo-10-(4-(3-thioxo-3H-1,2-dithiol-5-yl)phenoxy)decyl)triphenylphosphonium bromide (AP39)
Sophie Le Trionnaire, Alexis Perry, Bartosz Szczesny, Csaba Szabo, Paul G. Winyard, Jacqueline L. Whatmore, Mark E. Wood and Matthew Whiteman
Med. Chem. Commun., 2014, DOI: 10.1039/C3MD00323J, Concise Article

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