The research group "drug design" is aiming to design and develop novel biologically active molecules for targets in therapeutic areas of unmet medical need. We are developing new "out-of-the-box" tools such as MCR chemical scaffolds to address novel biological targets or software to facilitate design of drugs. As the main tool in chemistry we use and further develop multicomponent reaction chemistry (MCR). Our designer software ANCHOR.QUERY, for example, is helping medicinal chemist to rapidly discover novel (ant)agonists of protein interactions. Several of our compounds we recently developed for the cancer relevant protein protein interaction between the transcription factor p53 and its suppressors mdm2 and mdm4 currently undergo preclinical development.
Other targets we investigate are arginase (asthma), dUTPase (cancer, malaria) and Argonaute (transcription control).
Our state-of-the-art laboratory is well equipped to synthesize and purify medium throughput chemical libraries.
