The quest for small-molecule cancer immunotherapeutics

If you are working in computer-aided drug design, this in silico talk is for you: SIB Senior Research Scientist Ute Röhrig takes you on a journey to push the boundaries of knowledge around IDO1 and its role in immunotherapy resistance. IDO1’s promising properties caused an initial ‘gold rush’ from the pharma sector in search of inhibitors. But the effect of IDO1 inhibition proved to be complex in the clinics, and the pharma’s interest faded. The paper Ute and her colleagues recently published in the Journal of Medicinal Chemistry leverages 15 years of research on the mechanism and inhibition of IDO1: in this talk you will learn about the tools and approaches they used, applicable to any other drug target, but also what it takes to prepare for a renaissance of IDO1 as a target in cancer or other pathologies.

About the in silico talks series – The latest in bioinformatics by SIB Scientists

The in silico talks online series aims to inform bioinformaticians, life scientists and clinicians about the latest advances led by SIB Scientists on a wide range of topics in bioinformatics methods, research and resources. Stay abreast of the latest developments, get exclusive insights into recent papers, and discover how these advances might help you in your work or research, by subscribing to the in silico talks mailing list.

Speaker

Name:

Ute Röhrig

Institute:

SIB Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics

Group:

Molecular Modelling

Ute Röhrig studied chemistry at the University of Hamburg and at the Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich with a scholarship from the German National Academic Foundation (Studienstiftung des deutschen Volkes). In 2004 she obtained a Ph.D. in Computational Chemistry from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zurich for her work on hybrid quantum/ classical simulations of the photoreceptor rhodopsin under the guidance of Ursula Rothlisberger. After a postdoc at the Enrico Fermi Research Centre in Rome with Roberto Petronzio and Michele Parrinello, Ute Roehrig joined the Molecular Modeling Group at the SIB Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics in 2006. Her research interests include computational modeling and in silico drug design with experimental validation, especially using hybrid quantum/classical methods. Since 2016 she is teaching as privat-docent at the University of Lausanne. Ute loves mountaineering.