Computer-Aided Drug Design in Modern Drug Discovery

Dr. Yinuo Wu is an associate Professor in Medicinal Chemistry. She did her undergraduate degree at the Sun Yat-sen University (2002-2006) and then carried out a PhD (2006-2011). After two years of post-doctoral at the Hong Kong polytechnic University, she started her academic career in 2013 at Sun Yat-sen University. Dr. Yinuo Wu is particularly interested in the development of anti-fibrosis drug candidates. In the last five years, Dr. Wu has more than 50 publications and several patents on this field.

Dr. Tianmiao Ou is a Professor in Medicinal Chemistry and Chemical Biology. She did her undergraduate degree at the China Pharmaceutical University (1998-2002) and then carried out a PhD under the supervision of Professor Lianquan Gu (2002-2007). She started her academic career in 2007 in the Sun Yat-sen University. She had traveled to UK as an academic visitor and worked in the group of Professor Shankar Balasubramanian at the University of Cambridge (2012-2013). The whole group is particularly interested in the role of non-canonical nucleic acid structures that control gene expression (e.g. G-quadruplexes, and RNA structures in the non-coding regions of mRNAs). Their goal is to find out small organic molecules that target such structures and alter the expression of certain genes of interest. Such small molecule gene regulators are valuable tools to study mechanisms in biology and will also open up new approaches for therapeutics and molecular medicine, particularly for diseases characterized by aberrant expression of certain genes. Under the support of various funding, Dr. Ou has more than 70 publications and several patents on this field.

Dr. Dongsheng Cao is a Professor at the Xiya School of Pharmaceutical Science at Central South University. He is mainly engaged in research on efficient chemical informatics and drug molecule design methods and applications based on artificial intelligence technology. Focusing on three key technical bottlenecks in drug development (discovery of bioactive molecules, prediction of drug properties and safety, and evaluation of selectivity/off-target effects/drug resistance), he conducts systematic and in-depth interdisciplinary methodological research on virtual screening methods based on structures/ligands, prediction of drug properties theory, molecular target recognition, and molecular intelligence generation and optimization. Prof. Cao has already published more than 270 publications with a maximum citation count of 1691 per paper.