Anne Marinier

Director, Medicinal Chemistry, IRIC, Université de Montréal

Mass Spectrometry as an enabling technology platform in Medicinal Chemistry

Mass spectrometry is playing an important role at different stages of the drug discovery pipeline to identify potential lead candidates for further validation and to profile metabolites and drug conjugates during clinical studies.  Although largely used for the ‘fingerprint’ analysis of organic compounds by the medicinal chemists, the availability of modern mass spectrometry instrumentation now expands the analytical potentials of this technique to the characterization of target-ligand interactions and to study the pharmacokinetic properties of specific compounds.  Since its inception in 2008, IRIC’s medicinal chemistry platform at UdeM made significant scientific contributions as part of different drug discovery projects of the Institute.  More specifically, molecules that expand hematopoietic stem cells have been developed as well as pharmacological chaperones for the MC4 receptor and these are presently evaluated in pre-clinical trials. This presentation will highlight different projects in which mass spectrometry played a key role in support to the medicinal chemistry platform.