Stefan Schunk
Senior Director
Medicinal & Computational Chemistry
Zealand Pharma
Germany
Stefan Schunk is Senior Director of Medicinal & Computational Chemistry at Zealand Pharma in Copenhagen, Denmark. He is leading the joint department to drive design and discovery of novel innovative peptide-based medicines, mainly focusing on metabolic and gastrointestinal diseases.
Prior to Zealand Pharma he spent 15 years at Grünenthal, working in the fields of pain and inflammation. Here he served in various roles across research and early development – eg. heading the Medicinal Chemistry department, as External Innovation Lead scouting, evaluating, and in-licensing multiple research collaborations and as International Project Lead and. He started his Biotech career at Analyticon Discovery in the area of natural product based drug discovery.
He carried out postdoctoral studies with Prof. Kocienski at Leeds University, UK in the field of natural product total synthesis, received his Ph.D. in chemistry working for Prof. Enders at RWTH Aachen, Germany in the field of solid phase synthesis and obtained his graduate degree in Chemistry at the University of Erlangen, Germany.
L02 - Combining classical SAR and machine learning approaches for the design of novel peptide drug candidates
The search for fast and efficient drug design strategies has ever since been a constantly evolving topic. The concept of rational discovery was introduced by Elion and Hitchings, the field of quantitative structure–activity relationship (QSAR) analysis developed alongside. These approaches of correlating chemical structures and biological responses to rationally develop new hypotheses and designs is currently challenged by non-linear machine learning models. These can fail to guide medicinal chemists but are nevertheless able to drive the optimization of chemical series into promising drug candidates.
The talk will highlight practical approaches of integrating classical SAR as well as ML approaches into the design of novel peptide drugs.