The ” Therapeutic Targets and Drug Design ” laboratory or CiTCoM, a associate unit with the Paris Cité University, CNRS and INSERM, conducts researchs combining biology and chemistry to accelerate drug design.
The unit has all the skills required for an integrative approach to drug discovery and optimization combining structural biology and different tools of chemistry (medicinal, organic, organometallic chemistry,pharmacognosy, metabolomics) assisted by chemoinformatics.
The research conducted in the laboratory covers all the pre-clinical steps, from the identification and characterization of molecular targets of a pathology, the discovery of new compounds from synthetic or natural origin, biologically active against targets, to the characterization of their activity in the cell. The projects of research concerns a wide variety of pathologies (cancer, bacterial or viral infections, genetic diseases) and molecular targets (soluble and membrane proteins, RNA and large complexes).
CiTCoM is composed of 7 teams :
- Molecular RNA machineries and human pathologies
- Signaling and membrane transport
- Molecular mechanisms of viral RNA translation
- Structural and functional studies of new therapeutic targets by NMR
- Analytical chemistry and experimental toxicology
- Medicinal chemistry and translational research (INSERM labelled team)
- Natural products, analysis and synthesis
CiTCoM’s expertise joins together several inter-disciplinary themes :
– The production and purification of biomolecules by molecular biology and
– The Structural determination of biomolecules by NMR, crystallography and electron microscopy.
– The functional study of targets by biochemistry, biophysics and cell biology methods design
– The Purification and synthesis of chemical compounds
– The characterization of interactions between molecules (medium screening or fine characterization)
– Prediction of physico-chemical, structural and toxicological parameters by chemo-informatics
– The understanding of actives mechanisums at the cellular level
The activity of CiTCoM is located at the Faculty of Pharmacy of the Paris Cité University, the only Faculty of Pharmacy in Paris, and is part of the rich environment of the laboratories of the Faculty of Health and the major hospitals of the University. The research conducted at CiTCoM is supported by the technical platforms of the Unit and the Mixte Unit Service of the Faculty.