Chas Bountra, Ph.D., to Give Keynote Presentation at CHI’s Structure-Based Drug Design Conference
NEEDHAM, MA - Feb 19, 2014 - Cambridge Healthtech Institute (CHI) today announced Chas Bountra, Ph.D., Chief Scientist & Head of the Structural Genomics Consortium/University of Oxford, will give the keynote presentation at its 14th AnnualStructure-Based Drug Design conference scheduled for May 21-22, 2014 at the Westin Boston Waterfront, Boston, MA.
Dr. Bountra's presentation, "Structures, Chemical Probes, New Biology, New Targets for Drug Discovery: Is This the Right Sequence?," will discuss partnerships with nine large pharmaceutical companies to generate structure enabled, freely available, chemical probes; their collaborations with a network of academic labs to use these probes to dissect biological and disease networks; their plans to further improve target validation by using patient derived primary cells, and a new initiative to advance new clinical candidates into Phase IIa studies, pre-competitively.
About Dr. Bountra:
Chas is Professor of Translational Medicine in the Nuffield Department of Clinical Medicine and Associate Member of the Department of Pharmacology at the University of Oxford. He is also a Visiting Professor in Neuroscience and Mental Health at Imperial College, London. Chas is an invited expert on several government and charitable research funding bodies, and an advisor for many academic, biotech and pharma drug discovery programmes.
Prior to coming back to Oxford six years ago, Chas was Vice President and Head of Biology at GlaxoSmithKline. He was involved in the identification of more than 40 clinical candidates for many gastro-intestinal, inflammatory and neuro-psychiatric diseases. More than 20 of these molecules progressed into patient studies and more than five of these delivered successful "Proof of Concept" data and hence progressed into late stage development. He was involved in the launch and development of the first treatment for Irritable Bowel Syndrome (Alosetron) and was the first to show that neurokinin NK1 antagonists are anti-emetic in preclinical and clinical studies. He has given over 300 invited lectures. In 2012 he was voted one of the "top innovators in the industry".
CHI's Structure-Based Drug Design event will showcase informative, high-quality case studies, innovative techniques, and strategies to move from computation to experiment, and finally, to drug. Top scientists from pharma and biotech will address how they are hitting epigenetic targets, provide updates on the newest wave of GPCRs and other membrane proteins, and discuss the latest in fragment-based drug design. Attendees will return to their organizations with fresh perspectives and new ideas to maximize productivity and increase successes in drug discovery.
For more information, visit http://www.healthtech.com/structure-based-drug-design.
About Cambridge Healthtech Institute (CHI)
Cambridge Healthtech Institute (CHI), founded in 1992, is the industry leader in providing superior quality scientific information to eminent researchers and business experts from top pharmaceutical, biotech, and academic organizations. Delivering an assortment of resources such as events, reports, publications and eNewsletters, CHI's portfolio of products include Cambridge Healthtech Institute Conferences, Barnett International, Insight Pharma Reports, Cambridge Marketing Consultants, Cambridge Meeting Planners, Cambridge Healthtech Media Group, and The Knowledge Foundation. www.chicorporate.com