IRB Barcelona launches new conference series to debate priority areas in biomedical research

The Institute for Research in Biomedicine (IRB Barcelona), with the collaboration of the Fundación Banco Bilbao Vizcaya Argentaria (FBBVA), have launched a unique conference series, Barcelona BioMed Conferences.

Barcelona BioMed Conferences will bring together leading researchers to present and discuss breakthroughs in several fields of biomedicine. Each meeting will bring together around 20 speakers, selected from among leading international researchers, and about 40 additional participants for a three-day meeting at the IRB Barcelona, located in the Barcelona Science Park (Parc Científic de Barcelona, PCB).

Each conference is co-chaired by a principal investigator from IRB Barcelona (in some cases, two) and a scientific leader from a renowned international institute. This approach aims to foster collaboration and strengthen ties among scientists in biomedical research centers of excellence around the world. The small and selective conferences provide a unique opportunity to bring the forfront of international biomedical science to Barcelona as well as to project the top-level biomedical research being done in Barcelona to the rest of the world.

The first in the series: NMR in Drug Discovery

The first Barcelona BioMed Conferences for 2006-2007 focuses on Nuclear Magnetic Resonance in Drug Discovery, and will take place from 19-21 October at the IRB Barcelona, located within the PCB. The meeting is co-chaired by scientists Ernest Giralt and Miquel Pons (IRB Barcelona/UB) and Maurizio Pellecchia (The Burnham Institute, USA).

The conference will bring together chemists, molecular pharmacologists, and structural and computational biologists from research centers in Europe, North America and Asia. The line-up of speakers includes pioneers in the use, development and fine-tuning of nuclear magnetic resonance techniques used to obtain molecules that could be developed into drugs.

For nearly a decade, nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) has been successfully used to establish the three-dimensional structure of proteins, including some targets for drug development. It also permits the detailed study interactions between these proteins and potential pharmaceuticals.The conference will pay special attention to the latter aspect, given the renewed interest worldwide in using NMR for the rapid development of drugs. The pharmaceutical industry is now using NMR extensively to obtain new active ingredients, thanks to technical advances in the technique.

Two circumstances lead scientists to think that NMR will play a fundamental role in the future of drug development. First, structural genomics programmes are producing more and more three-dimensional protein structures with therapeutic potential. Second, more refined techniques and new NMR-based approaches are now becoming available, allowing scientists not only to study proteins of increasing size, but also to observe how a candidate drug interacts with a protein target without having to know the three-dimensional structure of that protein.

Gathering of cutting-edge scientists

The speakers invited to the Barcelona BioMed Conferences are among the leaders in NMR used for drug discovery. They will present their work geared toward optimizing NMR, particularly with respect to sample sensitivity and protein size. They will discuss the methods and experiments at the forefront of the field, which will help accelerate the discovery of new drugs.

Conference co-chair, Maurizio Pellecchia, from the Burnham Institute, USA, is one of the scientific pioneers in the use of nuclear magnetic resonance for drug discovery. He has experimented with the different methods available to obtain candidate drugs, in this case against cancer.

Another internationally renowned scientist attending the conference is Gerhard Wagner, from Harvard Medical School, USA. He is considered the leader in the use and experimentation of new NMR-based methods. Professor Wagner looks at complex systems to study large proteins. Protein size has been one of the limitations of the technique.

In attendance will also be Bernd Meyer, from the Institute for Organic Chemistry of the University of Hamburg. Four years ago, he invented a technique called STD (Saturation Transfer Difference), which has quickly become the most commonly used method in laboratories and the pharmaceutical industry worldwide to discover new drugs. Thanks to this technique, candidate drug molecules can be studied without having to know the three-dimensional structure of the protein chosen as a drug target.

NMR in Drug Discovery webpage
Barcelona BioMed Conferences full list