News

  • Kiin Bio free offer

    As part of my work I’ll be invited to help startups or review spinouts, this is always really interesting to learn about new science or insights from really smart scientists. However, one of the problems is often navigating through unlabelled presentations or disparate folders on different computers containing excel, word, pdfs etc. Simply putting everything in a data room to let 3rd parties try to navigate is not a viable solution.

    So I’m always interested in potential solutions, Rachel Skyner (who I first met when she worked on Fragalysis) highlighted an interesting looking programme. Kiin are offering elected academic and nonprofit teams get one year of free access to the Kiin Pioneer Programme and access to their drug discovery platform and hands-on support from the science team.

    Research teams are generating more data than ever before, but scientific discovery often stalls at the point of hypothesis-generation and decision-making.

    Promising early findings are often spread across papers, datasets, internal notes, and expert judgment. Priorities can be hard to compare, hypotheses difficult to track, and promising signals slow to translate into action.

    This programme is designed for teams who want to make their discovery process faster, more systematic, transparent, and actionable.

    We are especially interested in teams working on questions such as:

    • Which targets should we prioritise, and why?
    • Which hypotheses are worth testing next?
    • How should we interpret conflicting evidence across datasets?
    • Where are the strongest translational opportunities?
    • How can we make complex scientific decisions easier to track, explain, and revisit?

    No cost, no data transfer, all IP stays with your institution, available to academics and non-profits. Applications close August.

  • Avinas announces the first approval of a PROTAC

    Avinas announces the first approval of a PROTAC

    Arvinas, Inc. (Nasdaq: ARVN), announced that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has granted approval for VEPPANU (vepdegestrant, ARV-471) for the treatment of adults with estrogen receptor-positive (ER+)/human epidermal growth factor receptor 2-negative (HER2-), estrogen receptor 1 (ESR1)-mutated advanced or metastatic breast cancer.

    PROTACs are bifunctional molecules that bind to the target protein and an E3 ligase, the simultaneous PROTAC binding of two proteins brings the target protein in close enough proximity for polyubiquitination by the E2 enzyme associated to the E3 ligase, which flags the target protein for degradation through the proteasome. There is more information here https://cambridgemedchemconsulting.com/proteolysis-targeting-chimeras-protacs/ including a list of PROTACS in development.

  • Fragments 2026 meeting

    Fragments 2026 meeting

    The 10th Fragment-based Drug Discovery Meeting is at Churchill College, Cambridge on 📅 Monday 14th September – Wednesday 16th September 2026.

    Deadline to submit your abstract is Midnight BST, Friday 3rd July, 2026 and you can submit them here.https://hg3.co.uk/fragments/

    The following are the confirmed speakers so far:

    Dan ErlansonFrontier
    Andrea GohlkeAstraZeneca
    Christian Kersten, Johannes Gutenberg-University
    György M. Keserű, Hungarian Academy of Sciences
    Goran Malojcic, Novartis
    Jon Mason, Design for Structure
    Daniel Merk, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität
    Paul Mortenson, Astex
    Christopher Parker, Scripps Research Institute –
    Ailsa Powell, XChem/DIAMOND
    Jean-Louis ReymondETH Switzerland
    Geoffery Smith, Boltz
    Rob Van MontfortICR
    Christian KerstenJohannes Gutenberg-University
    Daniel MerkLudwig-Maximilians-University

    To register, please click the link below.

    https://registrations.hg3conferences.co.uk/hg3/frontend/reg/tRegisterEmailNew.csp?pageID=139865&eventID=346

  • RSC CICAG Chemical Structure Representations Meeting 2026 

    This meeting will be held at Burlington House, London, UK on Wednesday 8th April 2026.

    A one-day conference on Chemical Structure Representations will bring together researchers from academia, industry, and software development to explore how we encode, interpret, and leverage molecular structures in modern chemical science. From classical line notations and connection tables to graph neural networks, learned embeddings, and foundation models, the meeting will examine how representation choices shape prediction, design, synthesis planning, data integration, and regulatory communication.

    Talks will span cheminformatics, computational chemistry, AI/ML, structural biology, and drug discovery, with an emphasis on practical impact, interoperability, and reproducibility. By connecting experts in theory, algorithms, and application, the conference aims to catalyse new ideas and collaborations around one of the most fundamental questions in digital chemistry: how we represent molecules determines what we can discover.

    Register here https://registrations.hg3conferences.co.uk/hg3/frontend/reg/tOtherPage.csp?pageID=146302&ef_sel_menu=2733&eventID=360

    There is a fantastic lineup of speakers

  • New Approaches to the Treatment of Parkinson’s Disease

    The New Approaches to the Treatment of Parkinson’s disease was a great success. Many thanks to everyone who attended, I’ve written a brief report of the meeting here.

  • A new site!

    A new site!

    The Cambridge MedChem Consulting page is being updated!

    It may take a while to transfer all the content from the old site.