GoingToMeet

The discovery and development of new drugs for protozoan parasites has rapidly expanded to include multidisciplinary approaches from academia, government, and industry. Public-private partnerships have focused efforts on translational research and as a result, new drugs have been advanced into clinical evaluation. Unfortunately, development of several promising new drugs has recently been terminated in clinical trials thus leaving a sparse pipeline of new chemical entities that have potential for registration in the next few years. Importantly, the need for effective new drugs for major human parasitic diseases (malaria, leishmaniasis, and trypanosomiasis) is growing and concerns over antimalarial resistance to artemisinin-based drugs are building. This meeting will bring together chemists, biologists, pharmacologists, and clinicians to find solutions to accelerate drug discovery efforts. Key problems to be addressed include identification and validation of new targets, chemical biology and medicinal chemistry approaches to characterize new compounds, novel screening techniques to identify new chemotypes, mechanisms of drug resistance, and cutting edge strategies to progress new drug candidates into clinical trials. The objectives of this meeting are to discuss current methods to identify and validate new drug targets and to screen libraries of compounds to discover novel chemotypes; assess the potential for chemical biology and medicinal chemistry to optimize compounds that are specific and avoid resistance mechanisms; and identify critical paths for compound progression and to discuss the utility of key models for assessing preclinical drug leads.