INSTITUTIONAL SEMINAR
Drug discovery: challenges and computational applications
On July 3, the seminar “Drug discovery: challenges and computational applications” was held. It was offered in a hybrid format as on other occasions, in person, at the Graduate Classroom of the Faculty of Exact and Natural Sciences and Surveying of UNNE, and remotely through Google Meet.
The seminar presented the various stages involved in the drug discovery process, as well as the challenges inherent to this process. In addition, the speaker shared the results of a method developed during her doctoral studies, which uses quantum methods to prioritize drug candidate compounds.
Dr. Gabriela Aucar, a graduate in Physics from the National University of the Northeast, currently works as a Computational Chemist in the methods development team at the Drug Discovery Unit Institute at the University of Dundee, Scotland.
During her doctoral training, she specialized in the development and implementation of quantum methods applied to computer-assisted drug discovery. She has collaborated with experimental groups in the discovery of drugs for diseases such as the Dengue virus.
Since 2022, she has been an active member of the Drug Discovery Unit Institute, where her main focus is the development and implementation of computational methods for drug discovery. Currently, she works on machine learning methods to predict molecular and physicochemical properties of drug candidate compounds.