The UMass Institute for Drug Resistance is working to establish drug resistance as its own field, specifically at the “intersection of evolution and drug design,” according to co-director Celia Schiffer, PhD, in a new interview with Future Medicinal Chemistry.
“Drug resistance is an amazing field because you are really crossing between many different areas—evolutionary biology, systems biology, crossing through to drug design,” said Dr. Schiffer, professor of biochemistry & molecular pharmacology, in the feature-length interview. “Each of our targets is a system and it is very interdependent and how to develop strategies to modulate these interdependent systems with effective inhibitor design is the biggest challenge. The field of drug resistance brings to bear all the latest technologies in a huge number of diverse fields. I think that whatever disease you pick, how they integrate these technologies and these concepts, there is a lot to be done, and there are a lot of opportunities for a new scientist to go into.”
Read the full interview here.
In this Expert’s Corner video for UMassMedNow, Schiffer talks about her lab’s work to understand the molecular basis for drug resistance and the potential for developing very powerful anti-virals by addressing drug resistance during the drug design process.
