Welcome to MTi
The UMRS Paris Diderot-Inserm 973 under the direction of Dr. BO Villoutreix (DR Inserm) is composed of three teams based on the PRG campus (UFR Life Sciences). The unit works on the development of new in silico approaches that assist the rational design of new therapeutic molecules and pharmacological probes.
Structural bioinformatics and chemoinformatics are well-established research disciplines with numerous applications in the area of Life and Health Sciences as further highlighted by the attribution of the 2013 Nobel prize to 3 pioneer scientists working on these topics. (See additional comments about drug design and in silico methods)
At present, our main goal is to develop novel in silico protocols and new algorithms that assist the design of “high quality” peptides and low molecular weight chemicals with timely applications essentially in the areas of cancer, rare diseases and cardiovascular diseases.
« High quality » means that important efforts in terms of compound profiling (systems pharmacology) and ADME-Tox predictions to avoid possible adverse effects early in the drug discovery process are being actively considered and that we work also on compound optimization protocols.
The strategy to achieve our main objective considering our skills, the size of the lab and the national and international contexts, and suggestions from an external advisory board is to focus our efforts on 3 main interrelated research axes.
To increase our chance of success, we re-organized our research unit and created 3 teams, each one focusing on one research axis. The 3 teams are focusing on:
- Team 1 : "Structure-based peptide design" under the direction of Dr. P. Tuffery (Inserm)
- Team 2 : "Computational approaches applied to pharmacological profiling" under the direction of Profs. A-C. Camproux (Paris Diderot) and O. Taboureau (Paris Diderot)
- Team 3 : "Virtual screening and rational design of protein-protein interaction modulators with balanced ADME-Tox properties" under the direction of Dr. M. Miteva (Inserm)
Our research unit is also associated to two national technological platforms parts of the IBiSA network :
- RPBS : a resource forstructural bioinformatics)
- CDithem: a consortium dedicated to drug discovery.
We thank ANR, AnrS, INSERM,Paris-Diderot and INCa for supports
