UB-Center for Drug Discovery

Did you know that our body 'eats' itself to stay healthy?

Yoshinori Ohsumi was awarded the 2016 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his discoveries of mechanisms for autophagy or ‘self-eating’ which refers to the way our cells destroy and recycle their own contents.

The concept of autophagy emerged during the 1960s, when researchers first observed that the cell could destroy its own contents by enclosing it in membranes, forming sack-like vesicles that were transported to a recycling compartment, called the lysosome, for degradation.

However, the phenomenon was difficult to study until the 1990s, when Ohsumi conducted a series of groundbreaking experiments with baker’s yeast to identify the genes involved in autophagy. He went on to explain the underlying mechanisms for autophagy in yeast and showed the similar machinery is used in our cells.

His discoveries accelerated understanding of how cells recycle their contents to stay healthy and laid the foundation for a better understanding of the ability of cells to manage malnutrition and infections, the causes of certain hereditary and neurological diseases, and cancer.

Read more about his work: https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/medicine/2016/ohsumi/biographical/

Last week (February 27-29), we held the Computational Approaches in Secondary Metabolites Discovery (CAiSMD) workshop.

Participants were exposed to key lectures and hands on sessions on computational tools applied in natural products research.

A special thanks to the speakers for their inputs and time taken to prepare and facilitate the sessions, and to the TMS team for their technical support.

Thankful for 2023. Our mission continues. Happy new year

2023 was quite a journey at UB-CeDD:

- We are proud of 4 of our Masters students who successfully defended their thesis and graduated.
- Biomedical Technician training (BTT) with 7 participants.
- AI/ML training in drug discovery with 10 participants.
- Seminar presentations of the trainees (BTT and AI/ML) on what they learned during their training
- A hybrid drug discovery workshop by the NiDNA with more than 80 participants both online and on-site.
- And much more…

The year was all about mentoring, capacity building and strengthening collaborations with our various partners.

Thanks for sticking with us and Merry Christmas 🎄🥳

UB-CeDD in a glance…
www.ub-cedd.org

We’re now on X (formerly Twitter).

The scientists expressed the resolve at a recent two-day workshop with the theme, ‘Artificial Intelligence, Computational and Medicinal Chemistry-based Approaches for Antiviral Drug Discovery’ at the University of Buea Center for Drug Discovery (UB-CeDD) in Cameroon.

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Scientists call for accessibility to traditional medicines African university scientists have expressed the urgent need to collaborate to strengthen the human resource capacity of researchers and other experts...

This year’s Nobel Prize laureate in chemistry Louis Brus showed that the strange properties of tiny particles are quantum effects.

Louis Brus was working at Bell Laboratories in the US, with the long-term aim of making chemical reactions happen using solar energy. To achieve this, he was using particles of cadmium sulphide, which can capture light and then utilise its energy to drive reactions. The particles were in a solution and Brus made them very small, because this gave him a larger area on which the chemical reactions could take place; the more a material is chopped up, the greater the surface area it will expose to its surroundings.

During his work with these tiny particles, Brus noticed something strange – their optical properties changed after he had left them on the lab bench for a while. He guessed that this could be because the particles had grown, so to confirm his suspicions he produced cadmium sulphide particles that were just about 4.5 nanometres in diameter. Brus then compared the optical properties of these newly made particles with those of the larger particles, which had a diameter of about 12.5 nanometres. The larger particles absorbed light at the same wavelengths as cadmium sulphide generally does, but the smaller particles had an absorption that shifted towards blue.

Just like his 2023 co-laureate Alexei Ekimov, Brus understood that he had observed a size-dependent quantum effect. He published his discovery in 1983 and then started investigating particles made from a range of other substances. The pattern was the same – the smaller the particles, the bluer the light they absorbed.

The optical changes revealed that the substance’s characteristics had completely changed. A substance’s optical properties are governed by its electrons. The same electrons also govern the substance’s other properties, such as its ability to catalyse chemical reactions or conduct electricity. So when researchers detected the changed absorption they understood that, in principle, they were looking at an entirely new material.

There was just one problem. The methods Brus had used to fabricate nonparticles generally resulted in unpredictable quality. Quantum dots are tiny crystals (see illustration) and the ones that could be produced at that time often contained defects. They were also of varying sizes. It was possible to control how the crystals were formed so the particles had a given average size, but if researchers wanted all the particles in a solution to be about the same size they had to sort them after they were made. This was a difficult process that hindered development. This was a problem that Moungi Bawendi – also awarded this year’s Nobel Prize in Chemistry – decided to solve.

Read the story of this year’s chemistry prize in full: https://bit.ly/3rpwdre

The Nobel Prize in Physics 2023 has been awarded for experiments with light that capture the shortest of moments.

This year’s physics laureates Pierre Agostini, Ferenc Krausz and Anne L’Huillier have conducted experiments that demonstrate a method for producing pulses of light that are brief enough to capture images of processes inside atoms and molecules.

Electrons’ movements in atoms and molecules are so rapid that they are measured in attoseconds. An attosecond is to one second as one second is to the age of the universe.

Attosecond pulses make it possible to measure the time it takes for an electron to be tugged away from an atom, and to examine how the time this takes depends on how tightly the electron is bound to the atom’s nucleus. It is possible to reconstruct how the distribution of electrons oscillates from side to side or place to place in molecules and materials; previously their position could only be measured as an average.

Attosecond pulses can be used to test the internal processes of matter, and to identify different events. These pulses have been used to explore the detailed physics of atoms and molecules, and they have potential applications in areas from electronics to medicine.

For example, attosecond pulses can be used to push molecules, which emit a measurable signal. The signal from the molecules has a special structure, a type of fingerprint that reveals what molecule it is, and the possible applications of this include medical diagnostics.

Now that the attosecond world has become accessible, these short bursts of light can be used to study the movements of electrons. It is now possible to produce pulses down to just a few dozen attoseconds, and this technology is developing all the time.

The 2023 Nobel Prize in Physics has been awarded to Pierre Agostini, Ferenc Krausz and Anne L’Huillier “for experimental methods that generate attosecond pulses of light for the study of electron dynamics in matter.”

Learn more
Press release: https://bit.ly/457nZ51
Popular information: https://bit.ly/3rnZXox
Advanced information: https://bit.ly/4644RWO

The Nobel Prize in Chemistry is awarded to Moungi Bawendi, Louis Brus, Alexei Ekimov, for a fundamental discovery in Nanotechnology: "Quantum Dots"
Scientific background information: https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/chemistry/2023/advanced-information/
More updates will follow: https://www.facebook.com/OrganicChemistryPortal?ref=hl

The Drug Discovery Hybrid Workshop was a must-attend event.
Most of the presenters were MSc and PhD students who really showed mastery of their work. Experts from the fields of natural products chemistry, Artificial intelligence, Synthetic Organic chemistry, biomedical technology and Nanotechnology gave enriching talks on antiviral research as well.

We wish to express our profound gratitude towards participants across Africa both online and on-site and to our partners Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, , The Wistar Institute and .io, thank you for making this workshop a memorable one.

Looking forward to promoting collaborative and interdisciplinary research across Africa and beyond.
www.ub-cedd.org

We are thrilled to announce our upcoming drug discovery workshop.
Experts shall enlighten us through talks/presentations on the theme: « Artificial Intelligence, Computational and Medicinal Chemistry-based Approaches for Antiviral Drug Discovery »

We appreciate funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation through the . Much appreciation to our partners of the Martin Luther University of Halle-Wittenberg, Ersilia.io and The Wistar Institute

Day 1 online session:
https://lnkd.in/eaiKwPb8

Day 2 online session:
https://lnkd.in/efqQFPYp

Visit us for more on : www.ub-cedd.org

Tools for your literature review project

Wistar Scientists Collaborate with University of Buea Researchers to Identify Plant-Based Medicinal Compounds with the use of computer-aided drug design methods.


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Wistar Scientists Collaborate with University of Buea Researchers to Identify Plant-Based Medicinal Compounds Advanced computer models from Cameroon allow scientists to screen hundreds of compounds efficiently.

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Today, we celebrate the achievements and struggles of workers around the world. Happy International Workers’ Day! 🌎👷‍♂️👩‍🏭

At the UB-CeDD, our core mission is to train the next generation of scientists for global impact. Biweekly literature seminars are organized to keep the team up to date with the current advances in .
Visit us on www.ub-cedd.org to stay tuned on our various projects

Drug discovery is a challenging and rewarding field that aims to find new and better treatments for various diseases. However, there are also many obstacles and difficulties that drug discovery researchers face in their work. Here are some of the current challenges in drug discovery:👇👇

These challenges require innovative solutions and collaborations among researchers from different disciplines and sectors such as Artificial intelligence, Machine learning, Biotechnology, Robotics & Nanotechnology.

Today is a special day for us and a more special one for the vision bearer of the UB-Center for Drug Discovery . Everything you invest your efforts in is successful! This is a clear demonstration of your character and strong morals! You are an inspiration to us all. Happy birthday Dr Ntie Kang Fidele

At UB-CeDD, the Molecular Simulations team is in charge of the virtual screening platforms and participate in suggesting natural products and their computationally designed analogues, beginning from the scaffolds derived from nature or synthesised scaffolds.
For more, visit us at www.ub-cedd.org

Useful chart to structure your article

Natural therapeutic agents are prepared from compounds found occurring in nature, including plants, microbes, minerals and animals.
Below are some advantages of using natural products in drug discovery

5 Applications of AI/ML in Drug Discovery

Increasingly, pharmaceutical companies are adopting more efficient, automated processes that incorporate data-driven decisions and use predictive analytics tools. With the help of Artificial Intelligence, the drug discovery market is forecasted to reach US $8,419 million by 2026.

Applications of AI are not exhaustive since it has proven to be quite effective in Computer aided-drug design. We report herein some of its applications in drug discovery.

Worth reading