Experts shared their knowledge during a workshop on drug design

Both theoretical knowledge and practical skills were broadened during a workshop on simulation of drug design Advanced in silico Drug Design that took place at the Faculty of Science. About 20  PhD students and postdocs, mainly foreigners, participated in the tutorials.

Rational drug design is an important and prospective part of computational chemistry. Computer models enable to select the right candidate for the particular drug or explain how a molecule in a cell will work and how it can be modified.

“The workshop is aimed at a general overview as well as practical use of various computational methods that can be applied to designing new drugs. The lecturers have been focusing on this area for a long time. They all tackle the issue from different angles thus complementing one another,” said Karel Berka, the coordinator of this event and one of the lecturers, Department of Physical Chemistry and Regional Centre of Advanced Technologies and Materials.

The people who gave the tutorials were namely Pavel Polishchuk from The Institute of Molecular and Translational Medicine, Faculty of Medicine and Dentistry, Thierry Langer from the University of Vienna, from the Institute of Organic Chemistry and Biochemistry of the CAS, and Per Larsson from Uppsala University, Sweden. The workshop gained financial support from ELIXIR Czech Republic—a national hub for bioinformatics, which comprises an advanced computational environment, dedicated data collection, and unique tools provided for the life science community.  BioSolveIT, a company that specialises in developing software supporting drug design, provided the prizes for the competition.

The lectures are also available at http://fch.upol.cz/en/research/conferences-workshops/4add/