The short videos presented in this page are not a replacement of the seminar. They merely explain once more a few of the main points made in the Drug Docking seminar and practical.

Drug design is a long and tedious process, and most drug design projects die long before (and unfortunately also sometimes after) a medicine hits the market. I have been involved in many drug design projects in industry and academia alike, and these experiences have made me a bit depressed. The goal of making medicines looks every day less achievable. Simply because we know not enough, and too many of us think they know it all.

It looks as if drug design is a money game, but looking at the fact that the design of a new medicine gets 25% more expensive every year, I can only conclude that we need to start doing things radically different. I just don't know yet how...

Like desperate people do desperate things (like believing in the usefulness of alternative medicinal approaches propagated by Dr Quack, and other criminals), desperate industries are very open to unscrupulous scientists who want to sell them scientific snake-oil.

The pharmaceutical industry has bought in on many hypes over the years, and many unscrupulous colleagues got very rich over that (money that you pay extra when you buy a medicine, btw).

Many new drugs die along the development path because the ADME-Tox (absorption, distribution, metabolism, excretion and toxicity) problems cannot be solved.

Most drugs on the market today are direct or indirect the result of luck and a person who realized that he or she was lucky. Serendipity is a nice term for helping luck to help you.

Personalized medicine is a recent hype that also our Radboudumc bought into. It does not mean that we want to make a medicine for each single person, though.

I have been involved, one way or another, in many drug design projects. Feel free to skip this video, it is just bragging.

So, where do we go? And what are the tasks of bioinformaticians in the whole drug design project?