Dr. K-K Hwang
Head, HTS
Aventis Pharma.
Dr. Kin-Kai Hwang, is a Senior Scientist in the Drug Metabolism and Pharmaco-kinetics Department at Aventis Pharmaceuticals Inc. During the past 18 years, he has served as scientist, manager and department head, responsible for providing pre-clinical ADME information for more than 19 IND/NDA submissions. Since 1995, he has developed and implemented various in vitro and in situ absorption and metabolism models to screen and select clinical candidates from a series of analogs based upon the best ADME properties. Most recent, he is in charge of establishing high throughput screening technologies at Aventis Pharma in support of lead generation and optimization. Dr. Hwang had one patent granted and published more than 93 manuscripts, abstracts and book chapters in the major pharmaceutical and toxicological journals. Dr. Hwang also is an adjunct professor at the School of Pharmacy, University of Missouri-Kansas City.
Abstract: Plants are a valuable sources of biologically active metabolites which can be developed to drugs. Recent examples like the taxols or flavopiridol show that still today new exiting compounds can be found in the known species.
There are however some of problems involved in the lead finding process starting from plants, which make a special screening process necessary differing from the natural products screening from other resources, like fungi or bacteria.
Vascular plants contain usually a large number of compounds like polyphenols, tannins, flavones and isoflavones which interfere with the screening assays. Screening ordinary extracts of plants prepared by extraction with an organic solvent, yield many false positive results due to the colors of the samples or the unspecific activity of the compounds mentioned with multiple biological targets. It is therefore necessary to treat plants and their extracts in a special way to avoid these problems.
The Aventis scientists has developed new procedures and technologies to extract biological active compound(s) from plant and using bioassay guided screening technologies to isolate and identify lead(s) from natural products. The technology for compound isolation and identification will be discussed and presented in this conference.