The summer school

 

Parma: opportunities and challenges for drug discovery

The constant search for a higher standard of healthcare and for a more inclusive system, able to reach an increasingly higher number of patients, remains high on the agenda of the EU. In this perspective, Regione Emilia – Romagna is a highly competitive core hub in which industrial and academic research are growing side by side in the drug science areas, and in which all the competences required to meet the challenge of the drug discovery are constantly evolving.

The course

In Summer 2023, the University of Parma, in a synergistic collaboration with the Universities of Bologna, Ferrara and Modena e Reggio Emilia and with the support of the Medicinal Chemistry Division of Società Chimica Italiana (DCF-SCI), is organizing the second edition of the “Advanced School in Drug Research and Development” entitled “Enzyme Inhibition at the boundary between Chemical Biology and Drug Discovery”.

Tackling the issues that must be addressed to empower the design, characterization and development of new biologically active compounds, the program of the school will encompass some of the key aspects of the drug discovery process with a specific emphasis on the theme of enzyme inhibition.

The 2023 edition of the Summer School will be specifically focused on the role played by computational approaches and biophysical methods in ongoing drug discovery programs in academic and industrial settings.

In spring 2024 a third part of the Advanced school will be dedicated to the recent advances on the application of chemometrics methods to the analysis of big data.

 

 

Course outcomes

These days, companies and employers require a broad set of competences in addition to the specialized knowledge and skills acquired in each own expertise area. Among the most important ones that students will be able to obtain from this School are an interdisciplinary perspective on computer-aided drug design and biophysical analysis of drug-target interaction, as well as the capacity to communicate their findings to colleagues and collaborators with different background or skills.