The Brandeis Chemistry Department, together with GlaxoSmithKline and Pharmaron, is hosting the 2nd Boston Symposium of Encoded Library Platforms on August 4th in the Shapiro Theater. This symposium will feature 8 speakers from industry and academic labs, covering the newest developments in the technology of encoded small molecule libraries and related topics.
For several decades, major efforts have gone into discovering drug leads by high-throughput screening, in which “libraries” of thousands to millions of random compounds are tested in a highly repetitive fashion for biological activity, such as the ability to inhibit an enzyme. A new and elegant alternative to this process is the use of encoded libraries, in which each random molecule within the library bears a “tag” of DNA with a unique sequence. Libraries containing hundreds of millions of DNA-tagged compounds can be incubated with a target protein in a single tube, and those which bind to the target can be identified by high-throughput sequencing of the DNA barcodes in the protein-bound fraction. This approach has gained great popularity in the last few years, and is just this week the cover story of Chemical & Engineering News.
Science at Brandeis 