Monrovia, CA -- (SBWire) -- 08/17/2011 --Andreas Marzinzik, Director of Exploratory Medicinal Chemistry and Global Discovery Chemistry at Novartis Institutes for BioMedical Research, will give a presentation on “Novel Approaches to Inhibit Kinases: The IGF1R Case” at the 5th Drug Design and Medicinal Chemistry Conference to be held in San Diego, CA on October 19-21, 2011 by GTC.

Most of the efforts in the development of kinase inhibitors concern compounds targeting the conserved ATP binding site, with notable successes reaching the market and helping patients cope with their disease. It has however been recognized over the years that the development of ATP mimetic inhibitors often led to harsh selectivity battles fought on an increasingly clogged intellectual property field, paving the way for alternative approaches. Among those, the development of inhibitors targeting other functionally-relevant kinase pockets has received increasing attention in the recent years, mainly for the promise of alternative chemical matter and enhanced selectivity profiles. Andreas Marzinzik will present on a case study aiming to put these promises to the test for the insulin growth factor 1 receptor tyrosine kinase, from the identification of ligand-pocket pair to relevance in an in-vivo setting.

Dr. Marzinzik joined Novartis in 1995 and served various roles within research until 1999, where he joined Prof. K. B. Sharpless' group at the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla for a year-long sabbatical. He was appointed head of the Integrated Combinatorial Lead Discovery program in 2000. His research expanded from combinatorial library methodologies and screening to new hit finding technologies for difficult targets and alternative inhibitory approaches for kinases before he moved to his present position as Director of Exploratory Medicinal Chemistry in 2007. Dr. Marzinzik's research is concerned with Medicinal Chemistry for protein-protein interaction, peptide discovery, and recently he took also responsibility regarding antibody drug conjugate chemistry.

The 5th Drug Design and Medicinal Chemistry Conference will discuss strategies for hit and target identification, fragment based drug design, chemoinformatics, protein-protein interactions, ligand based drug design, computer aided drug design, protein flexibility, high performance computing, covalent inhibitors, mutational resistance, selectivity of kinase inhibitors, potency, specificity, lead optimization, ADMET, safety in drug discovery, advances in drug delivery and much more.

This conference is part of the 7th Modern Drug Discovery & Development Summit, which includes three other concurrent tracks: 5th Biomarker Discovery & Development, 5th Advances in Stem Cell Discovery & Development and 4th Protein Discovery & Therapeutics.

Wednesday, October 19 will be dedicated to a Plenary Keynote session. Thursday, October 20 and Friday, October 21 will be dedicated to the four individual conference tracks of the summit.

For more information, please visit http://www.gtcbio.com