Please join the College of Life Sciences
and Agriculture for the second annual Samuel C. Smith Visiting
Lectureship in Molecular Medicine as we welcome Dr. Richard Neubig of Michigan State University. Dr. Neubig’s talk, Drugging the undruggable: Targeting protein-protein interactions and gene transcription, promises to be exciting.
Tuesday, May 3, 2016
1:00-2:00 pm - Public Lecture
Theater 1, Memorial Union Building
2:00-3:00 pm - Reception
Room 334/336, Memorial Union Building
University of New Hampshire, Durham, NH
Please RSVP by Friday, April 29, 2016
Drugging the undruggable: Targeting protein-protein interactions and gene transcription
Dr. Richard Neubig MD, PhD
Michigan State University
Many drug discovery efforts in the pharmaceutical industry recently have focused on “low hanging fruit” or drug targets that are easy to hit. Cellular proteins that belong to families for which many drugs have already been found are considered to have a lower risk of failure. This includes signaling molecules like receptors, kinases, ion channels and the like. In the last 15 years, many academic groups have begun work on drug discovery that used to be the province of the commercial sector leading to more work on hard or “undruggable” targets. Dr. Neubig will describe studies that his lab has undertaken in two academic programs to target protein-protein interactions and gene transcription mechanisms that not long ago were considered undruggable. These may provide new ways to more effectively treat serious diseases like Parkinson’s and fatal pulmonary fibrosis.