Title:	Antiviral Drug Discovery on the Avian Flu Grid
Date:	March 19, 2008 (Wednesday)
Time:	4:00 p.m. - 5:00 p.m.
Venue:	Room 1027, 10/F, Ho Sin-hang Engineering Building, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shatin, N.T.
Speaker:	Dr. Wilfred W. Li Executive Director The National Biomedical Computation Resource University of California, San Diego USA

ABSTRACT:

Avian influenza virus subtype H5N1 is a potential pandemic threat with human-adapted strains often resistant to antiviral drugs. Several H5N1 specific proteins, such as neuraminidase (NA), hemagglutinin, and M2 ion channel, have been crystallized recently, offering great opportunities for structure based drug development. We have developed an advanced ensemble-based virtual screening (VS) relaxed complex scheme (EVSRCS) for novel inhibitors against targets in the influenza proteome. As an initial study, more than a dozen novel hits against the NA have been identified, and are being validated using experimental assays. EVSRCS offers significant enhancement over existing methods by taking into account of receptor flexibility captured through molecular dynamics (MD) simulations. In support of the proteome-wide search for antivirals against the influenza virus, the Avian Flu Grid (AFG) virtual organization (VO) has been formed with many participants from member countries of the Pacific Rim Applications and Middleware Assembly (PRAGMA). The AFG VO provides support for workflows involving molecular modeling, MD simulations and virtual screening, with databases and associated portal environment for management and analysis of MD trajectories and VS datasets.

BIOGRAPHY:

Wilfred W. Li received his Ph.D. in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology from the University of Southern California (USC) in 1994 where he studied the molecular chaperone GRP78/BiP as a model system for gene regulation and protein-DNA interactions. While a postdoctoral fellow at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), he contributed to the understanding of protein phosphatases in cell growth and apoptosis in the JNK/SAPK pathway. He became a senior fellow in Bioinformatics at the San Diego Supercomputer Center, UCSD, in 1999, and studied structure based proteome annotation. He is currently the Executive Director of the National Biomedical Computation Resource (NBCR at http://nbcr.net), UCSD. His current research interests include cluster and grid computing, cyberinfrastructure, high throughput proteome annotation, data mining, virtual screening, structure based drug discovery, multiscale modeling and visualization.

Enquiries: Miss Temmy So at tel 2609 8444

For more information, please refer to http://www.cse.cuhk.edu.hk/seminar