Questions & Answers

For companies considering membership in the Corporate Scholars Program:

Who Should Participate in  Visits in residence?

Heads of multidisciplinary Drug Discovery Projects, group heads, and professionals who seek knowledge of a current field for application in projects and management.

Why come to the UCSF MDI?

UCSF MDI faculty research spans the range from discovering molecular details of biological processes through structure determination and drug design to medicine. Interaction with faculty and peers at UCSF provides a unique opportunity to rapidly attain understanding of the current field and its relationship to drug discovery. There are many unique software developments at UCSF. In particular, the DOCK software program, developed by the Kuntz group, uses database and graph theoretic techniques to suggest molecules which have good steric and chemical complementarity to protein and nucleic acid receptors of known structure.

How is a scientific visit in residence planned?

Goals are established by visiting scientists. Interactions with faculty, hands-on experience in scientific studies, and interactions with UCSF laboratories may be incorporated. The visit in residence may emphasize the topics of a Meeting, including protein structure and analysis, protein folding, ligand design using denovo techniques, database mining, virtual screening of libraries, individual drug discovery fields, or may be constructed to provide breadth of understanding of drug discovery through access to expertise representing many scientific fields.  Sabbaticals are hosted by faculty laboratories.

How long is it and when?

UCSF MDI Meetings with outstanding speakers and participants from academia occur within the framework of the UCSF academic year (September through June). A visit in residence for a CSP scientist may originate with a meeting and extend for up to four weeks to address individual goals or may be planned independently. 

What are Case Studies?

Case Studies are one component of workshops.  They are nonproprietary scientific projects that provide hands on experience with computer aided drug design and molecular graphics using known data. In Case Studies the visiting scientsts may use UCSF software (for example, Amber,DOCK, protein folding, Midas Plus) and modules provided by MDL Information Systems, Inc., Molecular Simulations, Inc., and Tripos Associates for use by Corporate Scholars in support of the Program.

What is the outlook for structure-based drug design?

The number of potential drug targets with 3D structure known is increasing and exciting new applications for structure-based approaches have been demonstrated in chemical library design and in the virtual screening of libraries. 3D protein structures, which are being reported in increasing numbers, enhance the utility of homology approaches for structure prediction and the elucidation of protein function (a subject of the  UCSF-MDI meeting on Protein Sequence Stucture Function). Together with initiatives underway to sequence the human genome and those of other organisms it is easy to foresee many new potential drug targets with 3D information known.

Structure-based drug design has contributed to the discovery of drugs, including HIV protease inhibitors for AIDS. DOCK has proven useful at UCSF and in other academic and industrial laboratories in finding lead compounds in the search for new drugs against viruses, bacteria and parasites.

Amprenavir (VX-478) bound to HIV protease (Kim et.al., JACS (1995) 1181-1182) provides an example of drug discovery aided by structure-based drug design principles.