The 143rd Annual Meeting of the Pharmaceutical Society of Japan (Sapporo)

Organizer: Akira Shigenaga, Kohei Tsuji

Recently, development of mid-size drugs such as peptides and nucleotides becomes a new attractive modality because these drugs can possess advantages of both small molecular drugs and biopharmaceuticals. Since the first approval of the peptide hormone drug in 1960s, more than 60 kinds of peptide-based drugs have been approved and clinically used in Japan. In addition, since the first oligonucleotide therapeutics, Vitravene, was approved by FDA in 1998, a number of oligonucleotide therapeutics have been developed and their market size is expanding year by year.
The mid-size drugs contain a lot of molecules including peptides, oligonucleotides, glycans, lipids, and chimeric molecules. Therefore, researchers in various fields are actively conducting a wide variety of mid-side drug discovery researches. In this symposium “Frontiers in Mid-size Drug Research – Diverse Approaches to Mid-size Drug Development –,” six researchers in different fields will present the state of the art topics; “chimeric molecules for target protein degradation (Itoh),” “mitigation of off-target effects of antisense oligonucleotides (T. Yamamoto),” “cancer immunotherapy utilizing glycoconjugates (Manabe),” “drug discovery based on lysophospholipids (K. Yamamoto),” “exploration of drug seeds using mirror-image natural products and biomolecules (Oishi)” and “anti-SARS-CoV-2 peptides learned from HIV research (Tsuji).”