Nottingham/GSK drug discovery research published

The School of Chemistry at the University of Nottingham has a number of highly valued partnerships with GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) a global pharmaceutical company, including the construction of the GSK Carbon Neutral Laboratory forSustainable Chemistry, postgraduate research in organic synthesis and undergraduate teaching in medicinal chemistry. Over the last three years, medicinal chemists at GSK have been collaborating with staff and 4^th yr MSci chemistry students in the School, to discover a new treatment for Idiopathic PulmonaryFibrosis (IPF) a life threatening lung disease and preliminary results have been published (DOI: 10.1021/ml5002079).

Further research using an Equilibrium Dialysis (ED) assay with quantitation by LC-MS, has been shown to give results which compare well with an integrin antagonist well based cellular assay run at GSK. An advantage of the ED assay is that a mixture of compounds can be screened in a single experiment and therefore potentially the assay could identify novel structural types with known binding affinities. This data would enable the selection of new hit series for further optimisation by synthesis. Preliminary results have been published in ACS Medicinal Chemistry letters (DOI: 10.1021/ml500395v) and further research is underway.