Molecules' First Medicinal Chemistry Symposium (MMCS) Held in Barcelona

On September 8, 2017, Molecules organized its first Medicinal Chemistry Symposium (MMCS) in Barcelona, Spain. The atmosphere was excellent and, despite being a one-day symposium, more than 70 participants from 18 different countries joined the symposium talks and a poster session with more than 34 posters presented.

The first MMCS was focused on the topic of emerging drug discovery approaches against infectious diseases. We were delighted to count with two eminent scholars in the field who acted as session Chairs, Prof. Diego Muñoz-Torrero from University of Barcelona and Prof. Kelly Chibale, director of the Drug Discovery and Development Centre (H3D) at the University of Cape Town, South Africa, who gave a great talk entitled "Cell-Based Medicinal Chemistry Optimization of High-Throughput Screening Hits towards Orally Active Antimalarial and Antituberculosis agents".

Prof. Kelly Chibale giving his talk.

Besides these excellent Chairs, we had the pleasure of listening to first level speakers like Prof. Maria Laura Bolognesi (University of Bologna) who gave a lecture about sustainable multi-target drugs against trypanosomatids, Prof. John Kelly (London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine) with his exciting talk about bioluminescence imaging models for Chagas disease drug discovery. Other invited speakers like Prof. Jean-Marie Pagès (Aix-Marseille University) and Dr. Benoît Laleu (Medicines for Malaria Venture, Switzerland) attracted the attention of the audience with their interesting presentations on antibiotic translocation and membrane barrier, and on antimalarial therapies, respectively. 

Apart from the talks, we organized two awards: Best Oral Presentation Award and Best Poster Award. The first was granted to Dr. Alicia Boto (CSIC, Spain) for his presentation entitled “The search of new antimicrobial agents, by site-selective peptide modification”. On the other hand, the Best Poster Award, voted by all participants to the symposium, was for Prof. Francesc Rabanal’s poster (University of Barcelona), entitled “Design, Synthesis and Activity of New Polymyxins”.

Best Poster Award. From right to left: Dr. Lucia Russo (Conference Manager); Dr. Mireia Guardingo (Section Manager of Molecules); Prof. Francesc Rabanal (Poster Awardee); Prof. Diego Muñoz-Torrero (Conference Chair); and Prof. Rabanal’s team.

All the abstracts can be read in the Abstract Book that is available online at https://sciforum.net/conference/MMCS2017. Additionally, they will be published soon in the journal Proceedings.

We look forward to seeing you at the next Molecules Symposium!