Cresset to Sponsor Teach-Discover-Treat Competition

Cresset is delighted to sponsor the first runner up “Teaching molecular interactions with online interactive pharmacophore modeling” award in the Teach-Discover-Treat (TDT) Competition.

TDT is an initiative to provide high quality computational chemistry tutorials that impact education and drug discovery for neglected diseases. The tutorials and computational models will be solicited through a competition and made available through the TDT website.

Today, the TDT Steering Committee announced the following winners:

Overall winner, addressing challenge 2
3D-QSAR-boosted SBVS
Paolo Tosco – Department of Drug Science and Technology, Torino (Italy)

First runner-up, addressing challenge 2
Teaching molecular interactions with online interactive pharmacophore modeling
David Ryan Koes and Carlos J. Camacho – Department of Computational and Systems Biology, University of Pittsburgh

Second runner-up, addressing challenge 4
Public domain chemical databases for malaria drug discovery
George Nicola, Tiqing Liu, Michael Gilson – University of California, San Diego

Third runner-up, addressing challenge 3
Structure-based drug design for trypanosomal PDEB1
Khaled M. Elokely, Robert J. Doerksen – University of Mississippi School of Pharmacy

All four winners will be recognized at the Award Symposium at the next ACS National Meeting (April 7-11, New Orleans) where they will have an opportunity to present their work. All materials submitted to the competition will be made available through the TDT website at the time of the Award Symposium.

We thank all of the submitters for their contributions and efforts. We also thank the judging panel for thoughtful and detailed analyses: Pat Walters (Chair, Vertex), Yvonne Martin (Abbott, retired), Steve Johnson (BMS), Rajarshi Guha (NIH/NCATS), Steve Dixon (Schrödinger).

Financial sponsorship for the Travel Awards given to the four winners is gratefully acknowledged from the following organizations: ACS Innovative Projects Grant, Knime, OpenEye and Cresset.

We hope to see you at the Award symposium!

The TDT Steering Committee
Hanneke Jansen, Rommie Amaro, Jane Tseng and Wendy Cornell

We look forward to meeting all the winners and hearing about their tutorials at the ACS Spring 2012 meeting in New Orleans.