Speakers:

• Alastair Parkes, VP, Medicinal Chemistry, Evotec (UK)
• James Duffy, Senior Director, Drug Discovery, Medicines for Malaria Venture – MMV (Switzerland)

Moderator:

• Charles Mowbray, Discovery Director, Drugs for Neglected Diseases initiative – DNDi (Switzerland)

Presentation 1: Structure activity relationship optimisation – case studies (Alastair Parkes)

• The presentation considered common challenges in antibacterial drug discovery and used case studies to illustrate how these can be addressed.

Presentation 2: The experimental validation of MAIP: an open-source tool that can enrich the output from HTS and identify novel, druglike molecules with antimalarial activity (James Duffy)

• A collaboration between pharma companies and not-for-profit organisations resulted in development of the MAlaria Inhibitor Prediction (MAIP) web platform. The open access tool is hosted by the European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI) and freely available for researchers.
• To experimentally validate the tool, MAIP was used to select a set of approximately 6,000 compounds predicted to have antimalarial activity.
• The set of compounds was purchased and tested in a Plasmodium falciparum (P. falciparum) asexual blood stage phenotypic assay. The set of compounds selected using MAIP had a 9-fold improvement in hit rate when compared to a ‘random’ set that was tested in parallel and enabled the identification of novel, druglike compounds with antimalarial activity and potential for further development.

This live webinar including an interactive Q&A session was broadcast on 24 August 2023.

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