The 601^st meeting of the Sydney University Chemical Society will be held on Wednesday 30^th June
in Le Fèvre Lecture Theatre 2 of the Chemistry Building on the campus of the University of Sydney.
The speaker will be Prof. Andy Hamilton from Yale University who will present the 2004 Howard lectures.

Molecular Recognition: From Supramolecular Chemistry to Drug Design

Prof. Andy Hamilton

Yale University

The principle theme of this lecture can be summed up by the refrain “if nature can do it why can't we?” If nature can exquisitely control the selective recognition of a substrate or DNA sequence, or execute difficult reactions at room temperature and pH 7, or control complex signaling pathways through extensive protein-protein interactions, why can't we construct synthetic molecules that mimic, modulate or even surpass these processes?

The main challenge is, therefore, to reproduce in a synthetic structure, the intrinsic chemical microenvironment that can lead to recognition and catalysis. A particularly intriguing goal is to reproduce in a non-peptidic molecule the recognition of features of a peptide or even a region of a protein surface.

In recent years we have designed a wide variety of peptidomimetics that reproduce the conformational and peptide recognition properties of a short peptide. These molecules have been targeted to proteins involved in disease and some have proved particularly effective in slowing the growth of human tumors in animal models and others in blocking parasitic diseases such as malaria, African Sleeping sickness and Chagas disease. A major current goal is to extend this idea to entire protein surfaces with the synthesis of proteomimetics that can disrupt important protein-protein interactions.

We have prepared mimics of extended α-helices and also of non-contiguous domains and shown that they can bind to the exterior surface of other proteins and modulate their function.

Wednesday 30^th June at 5:30pm

Le Fèvre Lecture Theatre 2

Refreshments from 5:00pm