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Yusuf Hamied Department of Chemistry

 

Image courtesy Nathan Pitt.

The department hosted the 9th Royal Society of Chemistry Biological and Medicinal Chemistry Postgraduate Symposium on 11 December 2015.

The symposium was the latest in the annual series designed to showcase the very best postgraduate research in the fields of biological chemistry and medicinal chemistry.  There were eight postgraduate oral presentations of 30 minutes, while the lunch-time postgraduate poster session had 21 contributors. 

The symposium also used the Flash Poster format to invigorate the poster session, where the poster presenters 'pitch' a 2 minute slide to the audience to attract them to their poster, a format which has always generated lots of discussion afterwards.

There were also three plenary speakers; Alessio Ciulli, formerly at Cambridge and now at the University of Dundee, who outlined his recent research on bromodomain chemical probes, Charlotte Griffiths-Jones of Astex Pharmaceuticals who shared some recent results from their fragment-based approach which led to the discovery of a potent, low nanomolar, balanced dual cIAP1/XIAP antagonist and Nicola Steadman from Selcia who talked about the discovery of teixobactin, a novel antibacterial from a previously uncultured organism.

Registration for the Symposium was free and the meeting was attended by over 150 scientists whose feedback was overwhelmingly positive.  The symposium was organised by Dave Alker of David Alker Associates, Gordon Saxty of Fidelta, and John Skidmore, Chief Scientific Officer of Alzheimer's Research UK Cambridge Drug Discovery Institute.  

Look out for information on the 10th RSC Biological and Medicinal Chemistry Sector postgraduate symposium, which will be held in December 2016.