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The past meeting topics chosen by the Society for Medicines Research have
been many and varied covering, for example, numerous diseases, disease mechanisms,
new technologies, drug metabolism, safety, case histories of drug discovery
etc. etc.. Where possible, meeting organisers have always tried to include
at least one talk in each programme that incorporated some structure-activity
relationships, acknowledging the key role that medicinal chemists play in
drug discovery. (We still try to do this!) Even with this bias, we found
there were limited opportunities for the medicinal chemistry community to
speak at our scientific meetings. Bear this in mind with the fact that medicinal
chemists have always made up a significant proportion of the membership
of the SMR.
Just under ten years ago the SMR Committee addressed this issue and made the decision to experiment with a meeting at which the all the presentations would be given by medicinal chemists. To make the meeting more exciting, the topics were intended to focus on emerging areas of drug discovery, rather than well worked areas, or me-too chemistry, hence the chosen name - "Trends in Medicinal Chemistry". There was another benefit to be had - the meetings could be used as an opportunity for the younger generation of chemists to gain presentation experience at a UK meeting, in preparation for future, perhaps international, conference presentations. For the most part, this philosophy on meeting organisation has prevailed. Also, as this is the sixth such meeting of this type, we strongly believe they are hitting the right spot with many of our members. The attendances have been consistently high (from figures to hand, >110 at each of the last two). Not only that, on further analysing attendance data, they clearly have multi-disciplinary appeal. By way of change, however, we have moved away from holding them each year to every two years, lately alternating them with the more established "Case Histories" meetings. Moving briefly on to the programme. Despite the contraction in the number of pharmaceutical companies in the UK, we again have speakers from different organisations, representing the new and the established, large and small. As ever, there is wide variety and originality in the programme. We thank all those organisations for agreeing to participate. All it remains to say is - sit back, listen and enjoy!
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