​Speaker : Prof. Andrew David Miller 

Affiliation : Institute of Pharmaceutical Science, King's College London

Title : How Can Chemical Biology Help with Precision Medicine?

Date : March 28, 2016

Location : Science building 609

Time : 3 pm​

Abstract

Precision Medicine is a new term that can be broken down into two main aspects:

1. Personalized Medicine – where the most appropriate drugs are given to the most appropriate patients according to known genetic and epigenetic factors etc.

2. Precision Therapeutics – which refers to the design and creation of precision active pharmaceutical ingredients (precision APIs) that demonstrate exceptional levels of disease target-specificity and selectivity; and/or to the applications of methods and technologies that control drug biodistribution and pharmacokinetics sufficiently to enable the concentration of actives at desired target sites and no where else in the body.

Since understanding and exploiting molecular mechanisms in biology is central to chemical biology, then chemical biology itself can do much to inform and to assist, particularly in the area of precision therapeutics. Accordingly we will take a look at how a chemical biology approach has been used recently to give rise to totally new opportunities for the design and creation of precision APIs that appear to control pain, epilepsy, and potentially other neurological conditions too, with a very high level of disease target-specificity and tissue selectivity.