The Internet, and in particular, the technologies of the World Wide Web (WWW), have revolutionised information management, storage and publishing in the few years since its development. Both data repositories and analysis tools are becoming more 'distributed' and 'virtual', to satisfy the needs of very large scale, international collaborative research programs. The benefits of this for both academic and industrial organisations is readily apparent, although because of the rapid growth and development of Internet services, there is little experience of the effective use of the Internet within commercial R&D organisations.
The paradigm of Structure-Based Drug Design (SBDD) holds the potential to revolutionise the efficiency of drug development, especially when coupled to concurrent technology developments in the areas of Combinatorial Chemistry, Protein Expression and Purification, X-ray Crystallography, and NMR Spectroscopy. Unfortunately, the rapid development, and highly multidisciplinary nature of the process, has led to a situation where many staff in the pharmaceutical industry are ill prepared to effectively exploit these techniques to the full.
The SBDD Course combines training in Internet skills with a solid foundation of the principles of protein structure-based drug design. The course material will be prepared by senior researchers from the UK pharmaceutical industry, alongside leading academics. The quality and scope of the teaching material and assignments is independently reviewed by an academic advisory panel. The course is currently planned to be hosted at Birkbeck College, an institution with much prior experience in the part-time education of 'mature' students. Birkbeck College recently organised a related, and highly successful, Internet-based course, the ' Principles of Protein Structure' (PPS) course, which is one of the first academic, Internet-based, virtual courses, which has received national press coverage (e.g. THES, 10th Feb 1995, Independent 1st May 1995).
The course will take a typical 'student' around twenty four weeks (three eight week 'terms') of part-time study, of around two to four hours per week; although this time will vary according to the previous experience of the student. Forty weeks after commencement of the course, the course will be considered finished with no further assignment work accepted after this date.
Access to the course material is handled over the Internet via industry standard web browsers, such as Netscape and Mosaic, and a series of more specialised, molecular modelling applications. A further, essential, part of the course is the use of participative newsgroups and mailing lists, allowing students and tutors to share experience and knowledge, further enhancing contact within the professional community and further adding to the value of the course material. Once completed the course material becomes an extensible on-line reference manual.
Creation Date: 24th October 1995
jpo