Overview

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This course explores how researchers turn early disease discoveries into real, testable therapeutic tools. You'll see how scientists screen for promising drug targets among proteins once considered impossible to treat, and how they use structural techniques to visualize exactly how a molecule fits and functions inside the body. From there, you'll follow how those insights shape smarter, more precise drug design. Finally, you'll explore how biomarkers — the measurable signals doctors and researchers rely on — are developed and validated to track whether a treatment is working, predict who will respond best, and guide decisions throughout clinical trials. By the end of the course, you'll understand the full journey a new therapy takes, from an early idea identified in the lab to a validated, evidence-backed tool ready for real patients. This course is especially useful for anyone curious about how modern medicine actually gets made, step by step, from discovery to the clinic.

Syllabus

Application of yeast two-hybrid system on small compound discovery for cancer research
- This module traces how the Yeast Two-Hybrid (Y2H) system evolved from a protein-interaction detection tool into a platform for cancer drug discovery. It includes content on proteomics fundamentals and interaction-detection methods, the Y2H principle and bait-prey design along with variant systems like reverse two-hybrid and split-ubiquitin screening, and the experimental workflow from plasmid construction to colony validation, closing with case studies on Smad4 SUMOylation, HSP27/Livin peptide aptamer screens, and Ras-Raf inhibitor discovery. By the end, you will be able to explain the Y2H reporter system's logic, design bait/prey plasmids and cDNA library screens, interpret interaction data, and connect Y2H results to cancer drug discovery pipelines.
Structural biology An useful tool for understanding the biological function of macromolecules
- This module introduces structural biology as an essential framework for understanding how biological macromolecules perform their functions. Because macromolecules, such as proteins, range from only one to ten nanometers in size, they exist far beyond the resolution limits of standard optical microscopes. Consequently, their structures cannot be observed directly. To overcome this fundamental limitation, scientists must rely on advanced physical techniques, primarily X-ray crystallography, to accurately visualize and map their precise three-dimensional atomic structures, which fundamentally dictate their biological mechanisms and interactions within the cell.
Introduction of biomarkers the use of biomarkers in translational medicine
- This module introduces translational medicine, tracing how discoveries move from basic laboratory research toward clinical application. It begins with an overview of cancer biology, then focuses on post-translational modification (PTM), a regulatory layer that lets a limited set of genes generate much greater protein functional diversity, shaping cell survival, inflammation, and tumor progression. The ubiquitination system is presented as the central case study: a quality-control mechanism that determines protein fate, whose dysregulation is linked to cancer. The module then draws on research examples from liver, breast, and pancreatic cancer, showing how specific regulatory proteins affect tumor survival and signaling, and their potential as future biomarkers.

Taught by

Yi-Fan Chen

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