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Digital Frukost

Novel drug candidates for Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease treatment

Are you interested in mathematical or computational modeling of biological systems, using digital tools to analyze biological data, or in making your research more transdisciplinary?

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Hovedinnhold

This time Professor Nathalie Reuter will give a presentation of the Biotek2021 funded project and the use of computational biology methods for drug discovery against Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD).

COPD refers to a group of chronic respiratory diseases with debilitating long-term effects and is estimated to become the third leading death cause worldwide by 2030. There is no cure for COPD; the existing therapies involving bronchodilators and corticosteroids can at best alleviate the symptoms. We instead propose to target the underlying pathological processes for a beneficial treatment with less side effects and clear socio-economic benefits. We have identified eleven novel synthetic drug-like inhibitors of Proteinase 3, a protease considered a drug target for COPD. We identified the lead compounds from high-throughput screening and showed that the two most promising candidates have nanomolar IC50s (conc. where 50% inhibition is observed). 

This project is funded by NFR (Biotek2021) and has two goals. The primary objective of this project is to produce a First-in-Class drug candidate for treatment of Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD) targeting the underlying pathological processes. This will serve our secondary objective; finding industrial partners for commercialization of our product. The project is multidisciplinary and involves clinician (target verification), medicinal chemists (compound synthesis), computational biology (compound design), biochemists (enzyme assays) and toxicologists.

The seminar will be at the Computational Biology Unit, Thormøhlensgt 55 - 5th floor "Datablokken".

"Digital Frukost" is an open breakfast seminar series focusing on research activities at the interface between the biological sciences and that of mathematics, computer science, physics or engineering. Examples of such research activities could be mathematical or computational modeling of biological systems, application of engineering/control systems theory on biological systems or inspired by biological systems, application of mathematics/statistics/machine learning to analyze big data in health or marine sector; from sensor systems, imaging or omics technologies etc. The seminars are arranged by the Centre for Digital Life Norway (DLN: www.digitallifenorway.org).

We hope to see many of you there!

As breakfast will be served, please register your attendence using this link.