Monday, April 2 | 2:00 - 5:00 pm 

SC3: Drug Metabolism and Its Impact on Decisions in Lead Discovery and Drug Development

This short course will focus on concepts important for those wanting to understand how drug metabolism is applied to drug discovery and development. Topics will include how drugs are metabolized, what enzymes are involved, how drug metabolism concepts are applied during lead optimization, how drug metabolites are identified in pre-clinical studies and human clinical trials, the role of bioactivation in drug toxicity and the growing application of in silico tools in drug metabolism. Those scientists involved in medicinal chemistry, pharmacology and drug metabolism will benefit from this overview.

Instructor:

John C. L Erve, Ph.D., D.A.B.T, Consultant, Jerve Scientific Consulting, Inc


  • Applying drug metabolism concepts to lead optimization
  • Impact of drug structures on important PK parameters
  • Common assays for predicting clearance and metabolism-based drug-drug interactions
  • Growing application of in silico tools in drug metabolism
  • Role of bioactivation in drug toxicity

Instructor Bio:

SC_John_ErveJohn Erve, Ph.D., D.A.B.T., Jerve Scientific Consulting, Inc.

Dr. John Erve is from Chicago and received degrees in Chemistry (BS, MS) from the University of Chicago and earned a Ph.D in Toxicology at Oregon State University under the supervision of Dr. Donald Reed. Following postdoctoral work at Vanderbilt (1995-1999) he joined BD-Biosciences (Woburn, MA) as a Study Director. In 2002, he joined AstraZeneca (Sweden) where he was involved in characterizing reactive metabolites and their protein adducts in an effort to better understand the role of reactive intermediates in drug toxicity. In 2004 he joined Wyeth (Collegeville, PA) as a Principal Scientist responsible for metabolite identification. Following the merger with Pfizer in 2010, John joined Novartis Institutes of Biomedical Research (Cambridge, MA) as a Lab Head in Analytical Sciences. John returned to the field of drug metabolism by joining Elan Pharmaceuticals (San Francisco, CA) in 2012 and after Elan was sold created Jerve Scientific Consulting focusing on helping small biotech companies in the Bay area with their drug discovery efforts. His research interests include mechanistic toxicology and using mass spectrometry to characterize metabolites and metabolic pathways.