Report on the 10th Anniversary of International Drug Discovery Science and Technology Conference, 8-10 November 2012, Nanjing, China

The 10th Anniversary of International Drug Discovery Science and Technology (IDDST) Conference was held in Nanjing, China from 8 to 10 November 2012. The conference ran in parallel with the 2nd Annual Symposium of Drug Delivery Systems. Over 400 delegates from both conferences came together for the Opening Ceremony and Keynote Addresses but otherwise pursued separate paths in the huge facilities of the Nanjing International Expo Centre. The IDDST was arranged into 19 separate Chapters covering drug discovery biology, target validation, chemistry, rational drug design, pharmacology and toxicology, drug screening technology, ‘omics’ technologies, analytical, automation and enabling technologies, informatics, stem cells and regenerative medicine, bioprocessing, generics, biosimilars and biologicals and seven disease areas: cancer, CNS, respiratory and inflammation, autoimmune, emerging infectious, bone and orphan diseases. There were also two sessions of a ‘Bench to Bedside to Business’ Program and a Chinese Scientist programme. In each period of the IDDST conference, up to seven sessions were running in parallel. This Meeting Highlight samples just a fraction of the content of this large meeting. The talks included have as a link, the use of new approaches to drug discovery. Many other excellent talks could have been highlighted and the author has necessarily had to be selective

Discovery of LRE1 as a specific and allosteric inhibitor of soluble adenylyl cyclase.

The prototypical second messenger cAMP regulates a wide variety of physiological processes. It can simultaneously mediate diverse functions by acting locally in independently regulated microdomains. In mammalian cells, two types of adenylyl cyclase generate cAMP: G-protein-regulated transmembrane adenylyl cyclases and bicarbonate-, calcium- and ATP-regulated soluble adenylyl cyclase (sAC). Because each type of cyclase regulates distinct microdomains, methods to distinguish between them are needed to understand cAMP signaling. We developed a mass-spectrometry-based adenylyl cyclase assay, which we used to identify a new sAC-specific inhibitor, LRE1. LRE1 bound to the bicarbonate activator binding site and inhibited sAC via a unique allosteric mechanism. LRE1 prevented sAC-dependent processes in cellular and physiological systems, and it will facilitate exploration of the therapeutic potential of sAC inhibition