Dear Colleagues, Dear Researchers,

GP₂A (Group for the Promotion of Pharmaceutical chemistry in Academia) is delighted to announce that the 28^th Annual GP₂A Conference will take place online Thursday 27^th August 2020 at 15:00 CEST.

This year, 1 Keynote lecture and 2 Early Career Researcher Lectures will be delivered.

The video of the presentations are available here.

PROGRAMME

15:00 Opening – Prof. Pascal Marchand, University of Nantes, France

About the GP₂A network

15:15 Keynote Lecture – Prof. Barry Potter, University of Oxford, UK

Steroid Sulfatase Inhibition: from Concept to Clinic and Beyond

Session Chair – Dr Vânia M. Moreira, University of Coimbra, Portugal

16:00 ECR Lecture – Dr Tina Seifert, University of Gothenburg, Sweden

Modulating Sirtuin Activity – Development of SIRT2-selective inhibitors

Session Chair – Dr Niamh O’Boyle, University of Dublin, Trinity College, Ireland

16:35 ECR Lecture – Dr Zoe Waller, University College London, UK

Targeting i-motif DNA structures

Session Chair – Dr Francesca Giuntini, Liverpool John Moores University, UK

17:10 Dr Nicolas Primas, Aix-Marseille University, France

Next GP₂A Conference in Marseille, France – 25^th-27^th August 2021

17:20 End of the meeting

We look forward to welcoming you to this exciting online event with the aim of continuing on from what was an excellent and scientifically stimulating meeting last August in Nottingham – UK. Please save the date in your diaries!

CVs in brief…

Prof. Barry V. L. Potter
	Barry Potter studied Chemistry at Oxford University, completing a DPhil on the stereochemistry of enzyme-catalyzed phosphoryl transfer and receiving a DSc from Oxford in 1993. After postdocs in Oxford and Göttingen at the Max-Planck-Institute für experimentelle Medizin, he was lecturer in Biological Chemistry at the University of Leicester, won a Lister Institute of Preventive Medicine Fellowship and moved to the established chair of Medicinal Chemistry at Bath as Head of Section for over 20 years. His research is in enzymology, signal transduction chemistry and anticancer drug discovery. Through his co-founded university spin-out biotech company he has brought his drugs to multiple human clinical trials with clinical benefit in oncology, published over 550 papers, is inventor of 45granted US patents, and serves on many editorial boards. In 2015 he moved back to Oxford as Professor of Medicinal & Biological Chemistry. He has won four RSC medals for his cancer discovery work and for Chemical Biology, the GlaxoSmithKline International Achievement Award and the 2018 Tu Youyou Award in Natural Product and Medicinal Chemistry. He was 2012 European Life Science Awards Investigator of the Year, held the 2016 RSC-BMCS Medicinal Chemistry Lectureship and was elected to the UK National Academy of Medical Sciences and to the Academia Europaea.
Dr. Tina Seifert
	Tina studied chemistry at the Technical University of Chemnitz, Germany and moved to Sweden in 2009 to join the research group of Prof. Kristina Luthman at the Department of Chemistry and Molecular Biology at the University of Gothenburg to start to work on the development of small-molecule enzyme inhibitors focusing in the Sirtuin family and graduated in 2014. Subsequently, she continued to work as researcher and Postdoctoral fellow under the mentorship of Prof. Luthman continuing to work with small-molecular entities but starting to pursue her own ideas and shifting her research interest towards peptide-based Sirtuin inhibitors.
Dr. Zoe Waller
	Zoё studied for a PhD in the Chemical Biology of G-Quadruplex DNA under the supervision of Sir Prof Shankar Balasubramanian. After defending her thesis in 2009 she worked as a teacher and then as a Senior Demonstrator in Medicinal Chemistry in the School of Pharmacy at UEA. After gaining some further experience in industry at HFL Sport Science she returned to UEA in late 2010 as a junior Lecturer in Chemical Biology. She was promoted to Lecturer in 2014 and Senior Lecturer in 2017. Zoë is currently an Associate Professor in Drug Discovery at the School of Pharmacy at UCL. Zoё’s research is focussed at the interface between chemistry and biology and she is particularly interested in drug-nucleic acid interactions and studying alternative DNA structures, in particular i-motif DNA. Her research has two general themes: switching DNA conformation for uses in nanotechnology and targeting DNA/RNA with small molecule ligands for applications in biology.