The Center for Business Intelligence announces Leverage Natural Products for Drug Development Conference

Woburn, MA - December 2, 2004 - The Center for Business Intelligence announces Leverage Natural Products for Drug Development Conference

The Center for Business Intelligence (CBI) will hold Leverage Natural Products for Drug Development on February 28-March 1, 2005 at Crowne Plaza Hotel in Philadelphia, PA. Over half of the approved drugs used today are made from natural products or related to them. Despite this, only a small proportion of our natural resources have been explored for new drugs. Thus, natural products as a source of novel leads for potential drugs will continue to play a key role in the drug discovery and development industry. The conference focuses on better understanding the value of natural products in the drug development process and methods for harnessing the opportunity they present. Conference participants hear case examples from keynote speaker, Barry A. Berkowitz, Ph.D., Corporate Vice President, Albany Molecular Research. Additional industry perspectives and case studies are provided by Advanced Life Sciences, Galileo Pharmaceuticals, Merck, Novartis Basel, Wyeth and many more. Topics Include:

• Licensing of natural products as a key value-driver
• Methods of finding new classes of natural products
• Techniques for extracting chemical entities
• The use of natural scaffolds to increase the diversity of screening libraries used to query targets, with the ability to generate hits with greater specificity and affinity for a particular target
• Efficiency of biological and virtual screening in discovering active compounds from natural products
• Combinatorial biosynthesis of natural products
• Biosynthetic chemistries for access to chemically diverse as well as focused natural product libraries
• natural products-based strategy resulting in a drug lead-target pair that is biologically contextual with a higher probability of therapeutic relevance

CBI events provide real life case examples given by leading experts and are excellent environments for networking. We look forward to seeing you on February 28-March 1, 2005 in Philadelphia, PA

For more information on this event or to register, contact CBI Registration at 800-817-8601 Fax 781-939-2490 Email cbireg@cbinet.com.

or vist the conference homepage