Congratulations to Mr. Yi-Ming Shao for winning Dean's Award, College of Life Science, National Taiwan University. Shao's research topic“Design, Synthesis, Biological Activity, and Complexed Structure of SARS-CoV 3CL Protease Inhibitors:(i) Trifluoromethyl Ketones and (ii) C2-Symmetric Diols”has won him this recognition.
Shao claims that this remarkable achievement is the result of the intensive collaboration of using computer- and structure-based inhibitor design. This is different from the traditional drug design procedure because the inhibitor optimization could be attained by the combination of computational prediction and synthetic organic chemistry.
Shao is a graduate student of NTU and co-oped with GRC. He started this research by joining one of the SARS research teams led by Dr. Chi-Huey Wong in 2003. He did the work of optimizing the TL-3 compound, a moderate 3CL protease inhibitor, which has been well noticed in the drug discovery arena of SARS research.
Shao said that he confronted many difficulties and was frustrated for quite some time when no progress was made. And finally, it proves that hard-work pays off. On November 21,2005, Shao successfully synthesized the predicted molecule. This study demonstrates that both potency and selectivity can be achieved by computer-aided design. Furthermore, the molecular interactions of the small molecule and 3CL protease will be disclosed using X-ray crystallography, and to the best of their knowledge, it will be the first crystal structure of 3CL protease in complex with the noncovalent inhibitor.
In addition, this work was presented in the poster session at the 8th International Symposium on Organic Reactions in Kobe, Japan (Apr 23-26, 2006) and Shao also won the Best Poster Award.
Shao thinks this could not be accomplished without all the great assistance he received. He likes to express gratitudes especially to Dr. Chi-Huey Wong, Dr. An-Suei Yang, Mr. Hung-Pin Peng, Dr. Keng-Chang Tsai, Dr.Min-Feng Hsu, and many others who had helped him.
He thinks these awards are indeed the result of group efforts.