Some 140 registrants attended the second Center for Drug Discovery Conference at UGA, where three international experts on HIV, hepatitis C and inflammatory diseases gave presentations.
Raymond Schinazi of Emory University’s Virology/Drug Discovery CFAR Center for AIDS Research, discussed “Curative Therapies for HIV and HCV.” Schinazi is best known for his innovative and pioneering work antiviral drug discovery and development. Jeffrey Glenn, who discussed “New Approaches to Hepatitis C,” is at Stanford School of Medicine, where his primary research interest is in molecular virology, with a strong emphasis on novel antiviral therapies. Jilly Evans of Amira Pharmaceuticals discussed the “Development of FLAP Inhibitors: Novel Drugs for the Treatment of Inflammatory Diseases.”
In conjunction with the conference, 52 posters were submitted by graduate students and postdoctoral fellows from UGA, the Medical College of Georgia, Mercer University and Georgia State University. The best postdoctoral poster award went to Anna Goc in UGA’s clinical and administrative pharmacy department. Meagan McManus in UGA’s department of pharmaceutical and biomedical sciences was the winner of the best graduate student poster award. Winners of the second and third place graduate student poster awards were Sailaja Arungundram from UGA’s Complex Carbohydrate Research Center and Sethu Nair from UGA’s department of cellular biology, respectively.
The conference was directed by Vasu Nair, director of the Center for Drug Discovery. Nair also is the William H. Terry Sr. Chair and Georgia Research Alliance Eminent Scholar in Drug Discovery, and head of the pharmaceutical and biomedical sciences department in the pharmacy college.
