CADD courses & seminars @ UdS

We offer courses and seminars focused mainly on data driven drug design embedded in the Center for Bioinformatics at Saarland University. We also supervise students from bioinformatics, as well as computer and life sciences, in diverse individual research projects.

Our CADD course is an interactive lecture, in which students learn various methods from structural bio- and cheminformatics, including available software tools and libraries, that support data generation and analysis in different areas of computer-aided drug design (CADD). The course sensitizes students to the straightforward and profitable use of bio-/cheminformatics methods. It is designed to enable students to build their own CADD pipeline, including protein target preparation, compound library assembly and filtering, protein-ligand docking and result evaluation. The course is composed of lectures to explain the various concepts, a brief introduction to Python programming using interactive Jupyter notebooks and exercises in which students develop their own scripts, leaning on TeachOpenCADD.

Our CADD seminar, is an introductory seminar to computer-aided drug design, including structure- and ligand-based methods. After giving a brief introduction, students select a topic from the presented drug development pipeline and independently acquire knowledge on the selected topics in the context of structural bio- and cheminformatics. Topics include homology modeling, target assessment, molecular docking, virtual screening, molecular fingerprints, chemical similarity, ADMET predictions and QSAR; especially with increased focus on ML and DL methods. Under guidance, material (papers, data and algorithms ) are collected by each student and presented at the end of the seminar, including the implementation of an application of the individual topics.

Our ML models for drug design seminar focuses on the importance of reproducibility. Numerous research manuscripts, even in high-impact journals and covering broader topics of interest, often lack the necessary elements for easy reproducibility. In this seminar, attendees will receive research manuscripts that share data and software / scripts for download. Your task will involve summarizing the manuscript, similar to typical seminars, and reproducing one of the core results using the provided software and data.

The Bioinformatics II course, designed for bioinformatics bachelor students, follows the Bioinformatics I course and is conducted in German. While Bioinformatics I focuses on sequence-based bioinformatics methods, the Bioinformatics II course emphasizes the theory and practice of bioinformatics related to molecular structures and interactions, covering topics such as protein structures, assignment and prediction of secondary structures, deep learning, homology modeling, and molecular docking.

Current courses

  • CADD Course (154613): Open-Source Software and Libraries for Data Driven Drug Design
  • CADD Seminar: Data Driven Drug Design - Methods and Applications

Previous courses

  • Bioinformatics II (151047) SS2024
  • ML models for drug design Seminar (147394): Case studies of reproducibility in bioinformatics: ML models for drug design WS2023/24
  • CADD Course (147121): Open-Source Software and Libraries for Data Driven Drug Design - WS2023/24
  • CADD Seminar (144048): Data Driven Drug Design - Methods and Applications -SS2023
  • CADD Course (140645): Open-Source Software and Libraries for Data Driven Drug Design - WS2022

For registeration, please send an email to Stefanie Wessinger with your full name, matriculation number and the name of the course or seminar you wish to enroll in.

Resources

Current courses

Previous courses