Enade Istyastono, PhD-student in the Division of Medicinal Chemistry (VU University Amsterdam), obtained the prestigious Henk Timmerman Award, honoring outstanding young Indonesian researchers who are working in the area of pharmaceutical sciences.

Mr. Istyastono presented his prize winning work at the International Seminar on Medicinal Chemistry in Surabaya, Indonesia, and received the award from Henk Timmerman himself (emeritus professor VU University, who first introduced medicinal chemistry to Indonesia 25 years ago). Enade develops computational methods to discover and design small bioactive molecules (ligands) that can modulate the activity of pharmaceutically relevant proteins (like receptors and enzymes).

Mr. Istyastono recently for example elucidated the binding orientation of ligands in the histamine H4receptor (a key player in inflammation), by incorporating experimental pharmacological data into three-dimensional protein-ligand interaction models. This study was recently published in the Journal of Medicinal Chemistry and is part of TI Pharma PhD project (GPCR Forum project D1-105) of Enade Istyastono under the supervision of Dr. Chris de Graaf, Dr. Iwan de Esch, and Prof. Dr. Rob Leurs.