Thursday, February 23, 2012

A Success in Structure-Based Drug Design


News reports today state that vermurafenib, an oncogenic B-RAF kinase inhibitor, doubles the length of survival on average of those 50% of metastatic melanoma patients that possess the relevant mutation. This is a success for drug design guided by principles of protein structure, as the drug was discovered by examining interactions of candidates within the binding pocket of the enzyme.
Molecular biophysics in the service of medicine! Hopefully the structure-based screening work will soon be able to be effectively done virtually. At least, thats what we and many others are working on.....

Monday, February 6, 2012

Campus Paris-Saclay

Of course, I like to follow what happens to places where I used to work and live. One of these was the Plateau de Saclay, and this, it seems has just been selected for gargantuan funding under IDEX-2.

IDEX appears to be the French version of the "Exzellenzinitiative" in Germany, in which I partook six years ago. This came when Germany recognized that having a couple of universities in the top twenty would do wonders for its image, so the Minister concerned suggested creating a Teutonic MIT. Now you can't just do this, because it takes a lot of dosh, and putting all that money in one place wasn't politically viable (too few would benefit and the rest would lose), so it was diluted a bit, and instead gave a useful but, in my opinion, indecisive helping hand to the top 10-15 universities. (A minuscule fraction of the Heidelberg funding went to paying part of my visits there over the last 5 years).

Now, it appears, the French are thinking likewise, and with massive amounts of dough (about $10bn). Now this goes against the mores of the egalitarian France I used to know that would fund individual CNRS researchers with small salaries, no equipment and give them complete freedom for life with no accountability. But even France, it seems, can't abide languishing way down in the Shanghai rankings, and so it is that there will be the haves and have-nots. Paris-Saclay is a big 'have' and will be drinking champagne. Grenoble, another candidate, and where I did my Ph.D., lost out, so they will have to hit the whisky.

Paris-Saclay: Le Campus Aujourd'hui






Le Campus Demain