Discovery and design of biotherapeutics

• Explain what key properties for different biological molecules that may be relevant in different therapeutic situations
• Analyze the key features of a disease (key disease mechanisms) and suggest (generic) relevant drug targets
• Suggest relevant therapeutic scaffolds that could be useful for treating a given disease
• Design general drug discovery strategies for the development of key therapeutic scaffolds (e.g. antibodies)
• Understand the challenges of current therapeutics and propose alternative biotherapeutics that can overcome such challenges
• Conceptualize improvements in current marketed biotherapeutics
• Apply different computational tools for drug discovery
• Analyze and explain where and what machine learning approaches are relevant in drug discovery

Through lectures, exercises and group work, the course will cover basic theory, terminology, and analytical approaches within the topics of disease mechanisms and drug classes, replacement therapies and biobetters, convalescent plasma, human and non-human monoclonal antibodies, antibody engineering and advanced formats, nanobodies and alternative binding proteins, information-based therapeutics, toxin-derived therapeutics, microbiome therapeutics, gene and cell therapy, and computational methods in drug discovery. Moreover, the course will highlight current therapeutic challenges and involve students in case work around discovery and design of biologics.

27022/27026/27070

Lectures, exercises, and group work

Minimum: 20, Maximum: 120.

Please be aware that this course has a minimum requirement for the number of participants needed, in order for it to be held. If these requirements are not met, then the course will not be held. Furthermore, there is a limited number of seats available. If there are too many applicants, a pool will be created for the remainder of the qualified applicants, and they will be selected at random. You will be informed 8 days before the start of the course, whether you have been allocated a spot.