21 December 2009

Fragment-based conferences in 2010

There have been some great conferences this past year (see summaries of some of them here and here), and 2010 is shaping up nicely, particularly with the announcement of FBLD 2010 (below).

February 3-5: CHI’s Molecular Medicine Tri-Conference will be held in my beautiful city of San Francisco, with a program on medicinal chemistry that includes a fragment track, and a short course on “Fragment-Inspired Medicinal Chemistry” on February 2.

March 21-25: The spring ACS meeting will also be held in San Francisco. There will be a symposium on “Fragment Based Drug Design: Novel Approaches and Success Stories.”

April 20-25: The Keystone Symposium on computer-aided drug design will take place in Whistler, British Columbia. Although not exclusively devoted to fragments, the schedule shows plenty of talks on the topic.

April 27-28: Cambridge Healthtech Institute’s Fifth Annual Fragment-Based Drug Discovery will be held in San Diego. And if you missed the short course in San Francisco, you have another chance on April 26.

June 6-9: The 32nd National Medicinal Chemistry Symposium will be held in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and Dave Rees is organizing a session on fragments on June 9. Looks like a great lineup, with top speakers from Astex, Plexxikon, Novartis, Abbott, and UC Berkeley.

October 10-13: Finally, standing alone in the second half of the year, Fragment-based Lead Discovery 2010 will be held in Philadelphia, PA. This is the third in a popular series of conferences that started with FBLD 2008 in San Diego and continued this year in York, UK. An emphasis next year will be on biophysical methods - old and new - for fragment identification and characterization, as well as sessions on libraries, chemical strategies for fragment evolution, and success stories. A web site will be available shortly where further details will be posted. We anticipate a call for oral and poster contributions during the Spring of 2010. As far as we know this is the first major fragment event on the east coast of the US, so don't miss it!

Know of anything else? Organizing a fragment event? Let us know and we’ll get the word out.

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