One day symposium was aimed at providing mechanistic insight into the relationship between physical organic properties of drug candidates and their pharmacokinetics
Advanced Chemistry Development, (ACD/Labs) reports the success of its 1st Annual PhysChem Symposium: Early ADME and Medicinal Chemistry, which was held on 21 October 2004, at Hotel Le Parc in Obernai, France.
This one day symposium was aimed at providing mechanistic insight into the relationship between physical organic properties of drug candidates and their pharmacokinetics through contributed talks and panel discussions, hosted by a distinguished speaker panel of leaders in academic and industrial drug discovery research.
Antony Williams, chief science officer at ACD/Labs, stated: "ACD/Labs is presently at the forefront of physicochemical property prediction and in the past few months has expanded our efforts into property-based drug design with the introduction of ACD/MedChem Advisor.
"One advantage of being in the lead is that it exposes us to be further pushed, challenged, and motivated by leaders in the industry.
"Gathering together over 30 European scientists to celebrate and challenge our approaches enabled us to validate that our present vision is appropriate.
"We are presently focused on executing on these goals.
"We acknowledge all attendees and speakers for their insights, contributions, and support".
Michael Abraham from University College London, and Klara Valko from GlaxoSmithKline, were two of the notable speakers present at the event, which facilitated discussions on the vital questions currently at the forefront of drug discovery research.
Klara Valko opened the day's discussions with his session on the role of lipophilicity and acid/base character in drug disposition in vivo, and commented on the relationships between calculated logP/logD values and the HPLC-based measurements of human serum albumin binding and immobilised artificial membrane partition.
It was pointed out that the presence of positive and negative charges at physiological pH significantly influences compounds' in vivo distribution, and models for predicting human volume of distribution based on measured and calculated physicochemical data were compared.
Professor Michael Abraham gave a presentation titled Can we identify models for brain uptake and intestinal absorption?, as well as a short talk on recent work on skin permeability.
He commented on the success of the PhysChem symposium, and on the very friendly atmosphere and extended time scale, which facilitated a considerable discussion between speakers and delegates during the meeting.
The 2nd Annual PhysChem Symposium will be held in Obernai on 20 October 2005, in conjunction with ACD/Labs's 6th Annual European users meeting.
