It is a great pleasure for us to invite you to the webcast of the Society for Medicines Research (SMR) symposium "The Role of Sodium Channels in Disease" which was held on Thursday, September 27, 2001.

Sodium channels are highly selective molecular pores, the opening and closing of which shape membrane potential changes and give rise to characteristic action potentials. Recent progress has led to a good understanding of the molecular structure of sodium channels, how they work, and the significance of their expression in particular cell types. This, coupled with the therapeutic utility of sodium channel blockers for a number of disorders and the elucidation of distinct sodium channelopathies, is beginning to reveal how particular sodium channel subtypes are linked to different disease states. At this meeting, we had an excellent international group of speakers (one half from Academia and the other from Industry), who covered three general themes:

1. The development and use of sodium channel blockers as drugs to treat human disorders, with a particular emphasis on the central nervous system.
2. The emerging understanding of the heterogeneity of sodium channels and how different channels and specific manipulations to channels relate to different functions.
3. The prospects for developing new sodium channel blockers as drugs to treat human disease

The Society provides high quality forums for discussion of drug research among all disciplines, and this is the second in a series of planned webcasts to make our symposia available free to the scientific community Worldwide.

We hold four symposia a year for all those intersted in drug research. Forthcoming SMR Symposia include:

• December 2001: Case Histories in Drug Discovery
• March 2002: Orphan Receptors
• June 2002: Drug Metabolism, Pharmacokinetics and Drug Discovery
• September 2002: Proteomics

Visit our previous Webcast on ‘The Role of Sodium Channels in Disease' (http://www.prous.com/sodium/).

We hope you enjoy this informative program.

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