Retrometabolism Based Drug Design and Targeting Conference
This series of symposia has been extremely successful in bringing together a select group of international pharmaceutical scientists to discuss new drug design strategies in the development of safer and more effective drugs.
Introduced in 1997 the conference brings together the world’s leading pharmaceutical scientists in order to discuss innovative approaches to drug design strategies. This invitation-only conference addresses research on drugs that are sequentially activated by enzymes for targeted organ/site drug delivery or improved bioavailability (chemical-enzymatic targeting systems), and also soft drugs designed to undergo predicted and directed, facile enzymatic inactivation to decrease adverse systemic effects of the drug and its metabolites. These strategies allow design of new drugs with dramatically improved therapeutic index due to their built-in metabolic activation/targeting or controlled metabolic deactivation properties. The retrometabolic based approaches have become an integral part of the general drug design and targeting approaches, and can now be widely used with the availability of the expert systems for design. Other approaches to improve the drug therapeutic index that are customarily presented at the conference include research on drug transporters, molecular complexes, and computer optimization of pharmacophores and others.
The first four (1997, 1999, 2001 and 2003) conferences were held in Florida, and successfully drew increased international participation with every event. The most recent conference was held May 8-11, 2005 in Hakone Japan due primarily to the extensive support received from Japanese participants, and was a great success. The Advisory Board members who were present at the Hakone conference met to discuss its direction, as well as plans for future symposia. Though the series’ “home base” will remain in Florida, it was decided to hold the next (2007) event in Hungary. The opportunity to move the conference to a European site is particularly exciting and further expands its accessibility to the international scientific community.
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Last modified October 16, 2006
