Andrea Scarpino

Andrea Scarpino – obtained his MSc in Pharmaceutical Chemistry and Technologies at the Department of Pharmacy, University of Pisa, Italy. His master’s thesis focused on the identification of new LDH-5 inhibitors through a multidisciplinary approach, by combining computational chemistry and synthetic organic chemistry. He mostly applied computer-aided drug design (CADD) approaches to generate a pharmacophore model, to perform virtual screening of compound libraries spanning a wide chemical diversity, and to make reliable predictions by means of consensus docking and molecular dynamics studies. Andrea is mainly interested in developing his computational background in drug discovery, and as ESR8 in FragNet he will apply CADD methods to identify fragment-sized covalent binders to be further extended into lead-like compounds. The ultimate goal of his project is to design and validate a computational protocol that integrates experimental data and covers many aspects of the in silico Fragment-Based Lead Discovery (FBLD) process, for the identification of new covalent inhibitors of FragNet targets.

Project: ESR8: Virtual Screening of Fragment Libraries of Covalent Binders
Academic supervisor: Prof. dr. György M. Keserű (RCNS)