Take 1.. minute for chemistry in health

Take 1.. minute for chemistry in health

Do you know how chemical scientists can tackle global challenges in Human Health? If so, the RSC is running a one minute video competition this summer for young researchers such as PhD and Post-doc students; get involved and innovate the way scientists share their research. Your video should communicate your own personal research or an area of research that interests you, highlighting its significance and impact to Human Health.

Five videos will be shortlisted by our judging panel and the winner will be selected during the ‘How does chemistry keep us healthy?’ themed National Chemistry Week taking place 16-23 November.

A £500 prize and a fantastic opportunity to shadow the award winning video Journalist, Brady Harran, is up for grabs for the winner.

The judging panel will include the makers of The Periodic Tale of Videos, Martyn Poliakoff and Brady Harran, and RSC Division representatives.

Check out our webpage for further details of the competition and an example video.

The competition opened on 02 April 2013 and the closing date for entries is 01 July 2013. Please submit yours to rsc.li/take-1-video-competition.

The winner will be chosen and announced during National Chemistry week, 11-16 November 2013

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Editors’ Choice: Structure-guided design of a selective BCL-XL inhibitor

This article describes the structure-guided optimisation of a screening hit against the pro-survival protein BCL-XL, which is often overexpressed in solid tumors and results in malignant tumor cells showing resistance to anticancer treatments.

Structure-guided design of a selective BCL-XL inhibitor
Guillaume Lessene, Peter E Czabotar, Brad E Sleebs, Kerry Zobel, Kym N Lowes, Jerry M Adams, Jonathan B Baell, Peter M Colman, Kurt Deshayes, Wayne J Fairbrother, John A Flygare, Paul Gibbons, Wilhelmus J A Kersten, Sanji Kulasegaram, Rebecca M Moss, John P Parisot, Brian J Smith, Ian P Street, Hong Yang, David C S Huang and Keith G Watson
Nature Chemical Biology, 9, 390–397, (2013)

Editors’ Choice articles are articles identified as being of high potential interest to medicinal chemists, selected from the wider literature by members of the Editorial Board.

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HOT: A critical assessment of modeling safety-related drug attrition

This paper is HOT as recommended by the referees, and is free to access for 4 weeks

In this HOT perspective, Hasselgreen and co-workers at AstraZeneca R&D Mölndal, reflect on the tough crisis that has afflicted the pharmaceutical industry in recent years, where the increased R&D budgets have not translated into new valuable products. This review offers an excellent overview of aspects and practicalities involved in preclinical toxicity prediction and analysis. The authors inspect commonly used guidelines/rules in medicinal chemistry aimed at reducing toxicity wondering if a simple distinction between compounds that have safety liabilities and “clean” compounds really exists. And crucially, they reflect on the impact of applying such guidelines on compounds progressing to clinical phases or even further and becoming approved drugs.

A critical assessment of modeling safety-related drug attrition

A critical assessment of modeling safety-related drug attrition
Daniel Muthas, Scott Boyer and Catrin Hasselgren
DOI: 10.1039/C3MD00072A

Free to access for 4 weeks

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Call for papers: Chemical Biology for Target Identification and Validation

MedChemComm themed issue: Chemical Biology for Target Identification and Validation

Guest Editors: Nathanael Gray (Harvard University, USA) and Lyn Jones (Pfizer, Cambridge, USA)

Submission Deadline: 30th September 2013

Submissions are now open for a high-profile themed issue on Chemical Biology for Target Identification and Validation, due for publication in MedChemComm in early 2014. It will receive great exposure and significant promotion.

Scope
Part of MedChemComm’s mission is to publish high level chemistry biology research which enables drug discovery. This special issue will be broad in scope, covering advances in the discovery, development and application of chemical biology to elucidate and validate new therapeutic targets. Relevant topics include (but are not limited to):

  • the use of –omics and imaging technologies
  • immunoprecipitation and affinity chromatography to identify novel targets and therapeutic modalities
  • the creation and development of new techniques to assess target (and off-target) engagement
  • advances in areas such as chemogenomics, microarrays, yeast three hybrid, RNAi and chem/bioinformatics

New research in MedChemComm is published as Concise Articles. This article type encompasses both Communication and Full Paper styles and is generally between 3 and 7 pages in length, but there is no strict page limit.

Manuscripts can be submitted in any reasonable format using our submission system. Template is not required. Please indicate that it is for the Chemical Biology themed issue in the comments to the editor field. The level of quality of this issue will be high, and all manuscripts will undergo the journal’s normal peer review process.

The deadline for submissions to the themed issue is 30th September 2013, although submissions before this date are of course welcomed.

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Editors’ Choice: Target validation using chemical probes

In this commentary article, Mark Bunnage and colleagues propose that by developing a ‘chemical probe tool kit’, chemical biology can play a more important part in seeking out potentially relevant targets.

Target validation using chemical probes
Mark E Bunnage, Eugene L Piatnitski Chekler & Lyn H Jones
Nature Chemical Biology, 9, 195–199 (2013)

Editors’ Choice articles are articles identified as being of high potential interest to medicinal chemists, selected from the wider literature by members of the Editorial Board.

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Patrick Gunning delivers first of two MedChemComm 2012 Lectureships at Spring ACS meeting

Patrick Gunning from University of Toronto, Canada last week delivered the first of his two MedChemComm Emerging Investigator lectureships at the 245th American Chemical Society meeting in New Orleans. Patrick’s talk, entitled Progress towards small-molecule, non-phosphorylated STAT3 inhibitors, was delivered as part of the Molecular-Based Approaches Towards the Regulation of Gene Transcription session.

Patrick Gunning receives his lectureship certificate

 Patrick will deliver a second lecture at the 96th Canadian Chemistry Conference and Exhibition in Quebec in May.

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MedChemComm Top 10 most accessed articles published in 2012 (Volume 3)

Curious about which articles published in 2012 gathered most readership? Here are the Top 10 works your colleagues have been accessing most in MedChemComm:

The developability of heteroaromatic and heteroaliphatic rings – do some have a better pedigree as potential drug molecules than others?
Timothy J. Ritchie, Simon J. F. Macdonald, Simon Peace, Stephen D. Pickett and Christopher N. Luscombe
Med. Chem. Commun., 2012, 3, 1062-1069
DOI: 10.1039/C2MD20111A

Gd(III) chelates for MRI contrast agents: from high relaxivity to “smart”, from blood pool to blood–brain barrier permeable
Chang-Tong Yang and Kai-Hsiang Chuang
Med. Chem. Commun., 2012, 3, 552-565
DOI: 10.1039/C2MD00279E

The use of phosphate bioisosteres in medicinal chemistry and chemical biology
Thomas S. Elliott, Aine Slowey, Yulin Ye and Stuart J. Conway
Med. Chem. Commun., 2012, 3, 735-751
DOI: 10.1039/C2MD20079A

Development of second generation epigenetic agents
Philip Jones
Med. Chem. Commun., 2012, 3, 135-161
DOI: 10.1039/C1MD00199J

Small molecules DNA methyltransferases inhibitors
Nadine Martinet, Benoît Y. Michel, Philippe Bertrand and Rachid Benhida
Med. Chem. Commun., 2012, 3, 263-273
DOI: 10.1039/C1MD00194A

Inhibition of bromodomain-mediated protein–protein interactions as a novel therapeutic strategy
Silviya D. Furdas, Luca Carlino, Wolfgang Sippl and Manfred Jung
Med. Chem. Commun., 2012, 3, 123-134
DOI: 10.1039/C1MD00201E

Epigenetics—an emerging and highly promising source of new drug targets
Nessa Carey
Med. Chem. Commun., 2012, 3, 162-166
DOI: 10.1039/C1MD00264C

From the protein’s perspective: the benefits and challenges of protein structure-based pharmacophore modeling
Marijn P. A. Sanders, Ross McGuire, Luc Roumen, Iwan J. P. de Esch, Jacob de Vlieg, Jan P. G. Klomp and Chris de Graaf
Med. Chem. Commun., 2012, 3, 28-38
DOI: 10.1039/C1MD00210D

Inhibitors of Stat5 protein signalling
Abbarna A. Cumaraswamy, Aleksandra Todic, Diana Resetca, Mark D. Minden and Patrick T. Gunning
Med. Chem. Commun., 2012, 3, 22-27
DOI: 10.1039/C1MD00175B

Investigation of the effect of molecular properties on the binding kinetics of a ligand to its biological target
Duncan C. Miller, Graham Lunn, Peter Jones, Yogesh Sabnis, Nichola L. Davies and Paul Driscoll
Med. Chem. Commun., 2012, 3, 449-452
DOI: 10.1039/C2MD00270A

Interested in submitting your own work to MedChemComm? Submit online today, or email us with your suggestions!

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‘Realising Lead-Oriented Synthesis’ wins the latest MedChemComm poster prize

Congratulations to Daniel Foley and Dr Richard Doveston who were awarded the poster prize at the RSC-BMCS Fragment-based Drug Discovery meeting, held at the STFC Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in Oxfordshire, 3rd-5th March 2013.

Daniel is a PhD research student working under the supervision of Profs. Adam Nelson and Stephen Marsden at the University of Leeds, while Richard took up a post-doctoral research position with Prof. Adam Nelson and Prof. Steve Marsden, in collaboration with GlaxoSmithKline in April 2012. Their poster entitled ‘Realising Lead-Oriented Synthesis’ won the competition. Daniel receives a one-year personal subscription to MedChemComm.

Fragments2013_‘Realising Lead-Oriented Synthesis’

Dr Richard Doveston and Daniel Foley, University of Leeds

Photo provided by the University of Leeds.

Also read the news item featured on the University of Leeds, School of Chemistry homepage.

Congratulations again to Richard and Daniel on their award! The MedChemComm team wishes them all the very best with their future research work.

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Methanocarba ring as a ribose modification in ligands of G protein-coupled receptors on the cover of MedChemComm, Issue 4

Methanocarba ring as a ribose modification in ligands of G protein-coupled purine and pyrimidine receptors

Welcome to MedChemComm Issue 4, 2013!

Featuring on this month MedChemComm front cover is the work of Dilip K. Tosh and Kenneth A. Jacobson at the NIH in Bethesda, US:

Methanocarba ring as a ribose modification in ligands of G protein-coupled purine and pyrimidine receptors: synthetic approaches
Dilip K. Tosh and Kenneth A. Jacobson
DOI: 10.1039/c2md20348k

Free to access for 6 weeks 

This work had recenlty been highlighted on our blogs – why not read the full post here!

Also in this issue, read the review article on Metabolism-guided drug design by Amit S. Kalgutkar et al. at Pfizer Worldwide Research and Development, and much more!

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Drug-target residence time: introducing a web focus

MedChemComm is delighted to present a concise web focus on drug-target residence time.

Koen Augustyns, Professor of Medicinal Chemistry at the University of Antwerp, Belgium, introduces the topic and has hand-picked 3 articles for this spotlight:

‘Analysis of drug-target residence time has begun to play a larger role in drug discovery as suggested by recent literature. For compounds with a slow off rate, long action at the target may render a perfect pharmacokinetic profile unnecessary, and selectivity vs. other targets inhibited only briefly may be more readily achieved. Specific, irreversible inhibition may be considered as the logical extreme for this approach. For other targets or therapeutic areas, other kinetic profiles may be desirable. The topic is timely as indicated by a recently launched Innovative Medicines Initiative project and the organization of several symposia exclusively focusing on this subject. However, there is a real need to build a better understanding in the medicinal chemistry and drug discovery community of the preferred profiles and screening methods for compounds with optimized drug-target residence times.’

In this MedChemComm web focus Georges Vauquelin comments on the determination of drug-target residence time by radioligand binding and functional assays and discusses their physiological relevance. Duncan C. Miller et al. investigate how molecular properties may affect the dissociation kinetics of ligand from its biological target. Finally, Juswinder Singh et al. describe the superiority of a novel EGFR targeted covalent inhibitor over its reversible analogues in overcoming drug resistance.

Interested? Why not read these three articles now:

Determination of drug–receptor residence times by radioligand binding and functional assays: experimental strategies and physiological relevance
Georges Vauquelin
Med. Chem. Commun., 2012,3, 645-651
DOI: 10.1039/C2MD20015E, Review Article

Investigation of the effect of molecular properties on the binding kinetics of a ligand to its biological target
Duncan C. Miller, Graham Lunn, Peter Jones, Yogesh Sabnis, Nichola L. Davies and Paul Driscoll
Med. Chem. Commun., 2012,3, 449-452
DOI: 10.1039/C2MD00270A, Concise Article

Superiority of a novel EGFR targeted covalent inhibitor over its reversible counterpart in overcoming drug resistance
Juswinder Singh, Erica Evans, Margit Hagel, Matthew Labinski, Alex Dubrovskiy, Mariana Nacht, Russell C. Petter, Aravind Prasad, Michael Sheets, Thia St Martin, Robert Tjin Tham Sjin, William Westlin and Zhendong Zhu
Med. Chem. Commun., 2012,3, 780-783
DOI: 10.1039/C2MD20017A, Concise Article

We hope that you find this selection interesting and stimulating to read – and why not submit your latest research in the area today!

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