Workshop on Artificial Intelligence, Chemical Libraries and Chemoinformatics approaches to Drug Discovery from Natural Sources. 

A successful, high-level collaborative meeting funded by the French Embassy and UCL Grand Challenges took place in the UCL School of Pharmacy 5th-6th March 2019 co-organised by Dr Prieto-Garcia (UCL School of Pharmacy) and Prof Bruno David (Pierre-Fabre and Univ. of Toulouse). The workshop allowed academics and researchers from 7 different French and British Universities to discuss state-of-the-art computational approaches in order to unlock the potential of natural products as sources of drug leads.

Current development of medicines from nature is hampered by the limitations of classic isolation strategies overlooking minor but powerful metabolites. Dr Genta-Jouve from Universite Paris-Decartes explained how these can be anticipated using open tools such a MetWork. Dr Beniddir (Universite Paris-Saclay) demonstrated how the application of Metabolomics-driven isolation can help to pinpoint these novel chemical entities ‘buried’ within the complexity of the metabolome’ and guide to their discovery. Dr Prieto Explained how to predict the bioactivities of very complex mixtures of natural products using Artificial Intelligence tools. Prof David made evaluated the modern use of chemical libraries with an emphasis on natural fragments. Prof. Okello (Newcastle University) presented the research activities at the Discovery Hub focusing on Neurodegenerative conditions, whilst Dr Rahman (LJMU) presented the newly formed Centre for Natural Products Discovery and discussed the current efforts on antimicrobial drugs. Dr Markiewick (Hexis Lab) shown the power of Deep Learning in the prediction of bioactivity and its application to Skin conditions. Dr Edrada-Ebel presented the research activities at Strathclyde University and demonstrated the potential of a combined NMR-MS metabolomic driven drug discovery from marine organisms and endophytes.

The second day of the meeting gave time to the attendants to discuss how bilateral research activities leading to competitive projects can be brought forward by taking advantage of both the potential synergies and common expertise on computational approaches within the group. For more information about its aims and current-future activities keep visiting this blog.

(From Left to Right) Upper row: Dr Prieto-Garcia, Dr Bennidir, Dr Genta-Jouve, Dr. Okello, Dr Rahman and Dr. David. Lower row: Dr Edrada-Ebel and Dr Markiewick.