Our three immersive "Boot Camps" provide intense, hands-on training in in vivo pharmacology, drug discovery, and Big Data analyses. IPSTP students are immersed in these subjects for a full week during the summer, gaining valuable real-world applications experience that supplements didactic learning. In these Boot Camps, IPSTP students gain the skills to apply their pharmacological sciences toolboxes – just as they would in their own experiments.
This weeklong experience introduces students to the basics of preclinical pharmacology research. Students learn to handle small laboratory animals and are exposed to several cutting-edge in vivo techniques used to test therapeutic targets for human diseases. IPSTP Students also learn about the regulatory requirements for small animal research studies, and they have the opportunity to visit the vet school and the MSU farms where larger animals are used in research. Each day is split between didactic learning in the morning and hands-on activities in the afternoon. Topics range from using C. Elegans for drug screening, to behavioral testing in rodent models of health and disease, to in vivo imaging using MRI and ultrasound. For many IPSTP Students, this is their first opportunity to learn how to work with research animals!
Hosted in conjunction with the MSU Assay Development and Drug Repurposing Core and the MSU Medicinal Chemistry Core, the week begins with lectures and/or paper discussions on Drug Discovery and Fragment Screening, Chemical Biology, Drug Development (including ADME and multi-parameter optimization), and the role of binding kinetics and molecular obesity. IPSTP Students will then break into small groups to follow an approved drug or a compound under development in an MSU lab through analysis of bioactivity (e.g., cancer cell viability or inhibition of protein-protein interactions) and in vitro ADME properties (e.g., solubility by absorbance and microsome stability and protein binding by mass spectroscopy). At the end of the week, groups present a summary of their results and an interpretation of the pros and cons of that particular molecule for further drug development.
The week begins with lectures on the basics of NextGen sequencing, data management/cleaning and analysis of RNASeq, ChipSeq and other key methods. IPSTP Students will then get individual access to the MSU High Performance Computer Cluster and receive introductory training in Unix, R, and GSEA programming languages. This training will then be applied to molecular dynamics simulations and small molecule docking using Amber and AutoDock Vina. The week concludes with a guided project – often using data from or related to their own research – to help IPSTP Students get started in use of these critical methodologies for modern pharmacological sciences research.