Expressing Drug Design - Triad Drug Discovery Group
“Identification of Drug Targets for Synergy-Based Therapeutics: Microarray to Drug Design” Harel Weinstein (Weill Medical College of Cornell University)
The 2nd Annual Medicinal Biochemistry Symposium was preceeded by a special visitor to the Triad Drug Discovery Group, both events w’hich are held at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro (UNCG). That visitor was the evenings keynote speaker, Dr. Harel Weistein of Cornell Univeristy, Sloan-Kettering and Rockerfeller University. Dr. Weinstein orated a unique perspective regarding the use of novel, objective bioinformatic approaches to traditional drug design processes.
The Triad Drug Discovery Group (TDDG), was orated by Dr. Lakshmi Kotra, an Associate Professor in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry at UNCG. The goal of TDDG is to “engage the scientific community…” and “foster translational research and the development of novel medicines”. Meetings are held on the campus of UNCG, in the Sullivan Science Building. As a Regional Exchange Group, TDDG is co-sponsored by the North Carolina Center for Biotechnology.
Dr. Weinstein’s presentation, entitled “Identification of drug targets for synergy-based therapeutics: microarray to drug-design”, ruminated among the audience of mostly academic and industry drug-design scientists. Dr. Weinstein’s message focused on the collaborative power among expression data sets, bioinformatic approaches and quantitative systems-level biological research that can lead to viable drug design in a fraction of the time needed for conventional development. By objectively performing comparisons and investigations on the independent basis of significance, and not that of annotated complex signaling pathways, the data has the opportunity to speak for itself, even if, at first it appears to be an alien language. This process has led to the discovery of novel uses for already known compounds, which if they had been sought out with traditional “annotated” signaling-networks, would have been lost in the unconscious bias of the scientific community.
