Models of Disease and Drug Discovery is a new course being offered this spring at MCW. Directed by Ramani Ramchandran, PhD., the course will focus on animal models of disease and drug discovery. It will complement and expand the current curriculum taught in the Developmental Biology course and the CTSI course Fundamentals of Intellectual Property. “This course will teach students how to identify drugs or small molecules using animal model systems and then take these hits to the next step of drug development,” said Ramani Ramchandran, PhD, Course Director. “This is a fairly unique course in academics – often there is no formal class that teaches model systems and applications of these model systems for drug discovery together.”
Breeding tanks in the CRI Zebrafish Developmental Vascular Biology Lab.
The course, recommended for advanced graduate students, fellows or even some faculty within the various basic and clinical science departments, will focus on the use of stem cells, c. elegans, drosophila, zebrafish, mouse, rat and sheep model systems for studying disease processes and how these models can be used for screening drugs. Computational modeling for the development of target-based drug discovery will be discussed as well. “The real objective of this course is to fuse two distinct but related concepts,” Dr. Ramchandran said. “One is about model organisms, their use for developmental studies and disease, and the other is how drugs are discovered using these model systems.”
For more information on the course, contact Course Director Ramani Ramchandran, PhD at (414) 955-2387 or rramchan@mcw.edu.
NIH Funding Acknowledgment:Important Reminder – Please acknowledge the NIH when publishing papers, patents, projects, and presentations resulting from the use of CTSI resources by including the NIH Funding Acknowledgement.
