This proposal is to request support for a Keystone Symposia meeting entitled ?Computer-Aided Drug Design?, organized by Kenneth M. Merz, Jr., Charles H. Reynolds and Dagmar Ringe, which will be held in Steamboat Springs, Colorado from March 29 ? April 3, 2008. The Computer-Aided Drug Design symposium will bring leading academic and industrial researchers together to discuss the many facets of computer-aided approaches to drug discovery. The goal of this meeting is to cover the use and development of cutting edge theoretical computational methods for structure-based design, ligand based design, ADME/tox modeling, and homology modeling. Case studies that illustrate the interface between modeling, structural biology and medicinal chemistry will also be presented. The meeting will emphasize how computational approaches can be used to address many of the key issues in drug discovery. The Keystone Symposium format provides an extraordinary opportunity for a broad array of computational chemists, structural biologists, and medicinal chemists to meet and exchange ideas on the newest approaches to using structure and modeling to discover new pharmaceuticals. PROJECT NARRATIVE The process of drug discovery involves many disciplines working in concert to identify new drug targets, validate those targets, and find and develop compounds that can modulate the functions of those targets in order to benefit the health of the host. In order to expedite this process at as many stages as possible, computational methods have been developed, and are at the forefront of research, with new methods being developed constantly. The proposed meeting will bring the newest computational methods to the attention of researchers from diverse fields.
