Introduction

In a little over one decade, antiviral chemotherapy has progressed from being an obscure and speculative branch of pharmaceutical chemistry to being a topic of regular newsworthy interest. 
This change has resulted from three important developments:

(i) the emergence of new viral infections of global impact and potential economic importance, such as HIV, SARS, West Nile, Marburg virus and Influenza H1N2. 

(ii) structural and molecular virology has made spectacular advances in our understanding of the basic interactions, between the virus and its host, that underlie replication and pathogenesis. 

(iii) developments in pharmaceutical chemistry, including high-throughput screening, structure-based drug design, combinatorial chemistry and rational drug design have made it possible to discover, validate and develop potential therapeutic leads with vastly greater speed and power than heretofore. 

This joint RSC / Biochemical Society conference brong together experts in pharmaceutical and medicinal chemistry with experts in molecular and celluar virology, forging links between the researchers of these different disciplines.

With 90 delegates in attendance, there was a real sense of participation and discussion at all stages of the conference.

Themes

• Structures of viral proteins and nucleic acids  
• Virus neutralization, cellular attachment and uncoating  
• Innate defences to virus components  
• Antiviral drug development    

Scientific Committee

Dr William James (Chair), (University of Oxford, UK)

Professor Geoffrey Smith, (Imperial College London, UK)

Professor Michael Malim, (Kings College London, UK)

Dr Quentin Sattentau, (University of Oxford, UK)

Professor David Rowlands, (University of Leeds, UK)

Dr Eddy Littler, (Medivir UK Ltd, UK)

Dr Richard Jarvest, (GlaxoSmithKline, UK)

Sponsor

We would like to thank Oxford BioMedica for their generous sponsorship support of the conference.

Co-sponsors

We would like to thank the Biochemical Society and the Society for General Microbiology for their co-sponsorship support of Virus Molecular Interactions: Therapeutic Targets.