The Medicinal Chemistry Divisions of the two Belgian Chemical Societies, Société Royale de Chimie (SRC) and the Koninklijke Vlaamse Chemische Vereniging (KVCV), are organising every year an international one-day symposium in Belgium, with the aim to update participants on selected areas of pharmaceutical research by specialists in their respective field.

MedChem 2017, with six invited lectures and three oral communications, will be held on Friday December 1, 2017, in Leuven. The title and focus of the symposium will be “The Many Pharmacotherapeutic Faces of Nucleosides and Oligonucleotides”.

The objective of the one-day symposium is to delve into the latest developments  of the applications  of nucleosides, nucleotides and nucleic acids in medicinal chemistry. The applications where situated in the past mainly in the fields of antivirals, anticancer compounds and antisense oligonucleotides. More recently, new therapeutic applications in for example immune-oncology, and the discovery of new functions of nucleic acids in the cell such as siRNA, Crispr/Cas  together with new breakthroughs in in vitro selection technologies (XNA aptamers), have revived the field and have opened many new possibilities  for drug design. The present knowledge in these different research areas will be presented during the symposium.

Confirmed speakers to date:

• Dr Roderick BEIJERSBERGEN (Netherlands Cancer Institute, The Netherlands)
• Dr Cédric BOULARAN (INVIVOGEN, France)
• Dr Philipp HOLLIGER (MRC LABORATORY OF MOLECULAR BIOLOGY, United Kingdom)
• Dr Tim JONCKERS (JANSSEN INFECTIOUS DISEASES-DIAGNOSTICS BVBA, Belgium)
• Dr Henrik MOEBITZ (NOVARTIS, Switzerland)
• Prof. Georg SCZAKIEL (UNIVERSITY OF LÜBECK, Germany)