開幕典禮及大會特別演講

P3
Applications of Structural Biology for Drug Discovery
Andrew H.-J. Wang
Institute of Biological Chemistry, Academia Sinica, Taipei 115, Taiwan.

  Structural biology, particularly synchrotron protein crystallography, is a powerful methodology to elucidate the three dimensional structure of important drug target proteins at atomic resolution. Such high resolution structures allow the visualization of functional regions of the drug targets, e.g., enzyme active site, in an unequivocal way. Moreover, the manner by which many bioactive drugs or inhibitors bind to the active site can also be examined. Thus our understanding of the mechanism and function of many drug target proteins can be improved so that better compounds can be designed for further testing.
We have focused our research effort in the areas of antiviral (IBDV, WSSV, SARS, etc.), antibacterial (prenyltransferases as major targets) and other important human diseases such as Alzheimer (glutaminyl cyclase as target), cancers and diabetics.
In this lecture, we will present several examples of potential drug target enzymes through the illustrations of their three dimensional structures and their interactions with inhibitors.