The Department of Biochemistry, Faculty of Natural and Agricultural Sciences invites you to join us for a presentation by Dr Helena Boshoff  (former UP MSc Biochemistry student) and Scientist at NIH (National Institute of Infectious Diseases), USA Head of Biological Research at the Laboratory of Clinical Infectious Diseases (Tuberculosis research section), NIAID, NIH, USA

DATE:           4 March 2015

TIME:            11:00am

VENUE:        NAS Faculty building, Seminar Room 7-34

SUMMARY

“Addressing major issues in tuberculosis treatment: accelerating TB drug discovery”

The high attrition rates in the drug discovery pipeline combined with the paucity of compounds currently in pre-clinical tuberculosis drug development raise concerns that new drugs to shorten the duration of chemotherapy and/or tackle drug-resistant disease will not reach the clinic in the foreseeable future. A Mycobacterium tuberculosis whole cell screening program of diverse compound collections and the subsequent hit prioritization process will be discussed. We have developed a 4-tiered approach to accelerating the process of tuberculosis drug development through early application of counter-screens and downstream high-information content assays including macromolecular incorporation assays, transcriptional profiling, metabolomics, mutant generation followed by whole genome sequencing, and other informative assays that will increase early lead candidate attrition rates while optimizing the likelihood of identification of novel targets.