The Annual General Meeting (AGM) of QCMS will take place online on November 20th, 2025, at 16:00 CET.
The meeting will be held on zoom. To attend, please register by sending a short email with “AGM2025” in the subject line to info _at_ qsar.org
The meeting will open with an invited lecture by Prof. Harel Weinstein, Maxwell M. Upson Professor of Physiology and Biophysics at Cornell University.
Following the lecture, the meeting will proceed according to the standard order of business:
- Report of activities (Scientific Director and President)
- Financial report (past year and budget forecast)
- Other matters
We warmly encourage all members to participate in this important annual event.
QCMS Invited Lecture 2025
Biology’s ubiquitous mechanism of allosteric communication is a designer’s ally if treated with… intelligence
It is now well established that allostery – the propagation of information over long distances at the molecular and cellular scale formalized by Monod/Changeux/Jacob – is a common and pervasive mechanism in biology. Because allosteric communication underlies function in a vast number of biomolecular systems, it is not surprising that the quest for modulators of biological function at the molecular and systems levels stumbled eventually on “allosteric modulation”. Under this name hide two different concepts: one is the modulation of the action of one ligand (the “orthosteric binder”) by another (the “allosteric binder”); the other is the modulation of the intrinsic allosteric communication that underlies the functional process itself. These two different concepts are essential, each in its own way, for enabling the design of therapeutic modalities and of various means to repair, or to mimic in engineered systems, various biological processes and molecular machines.
This presentation will focus on approaches to discover the intrinsic allosteric communication pathways in proteins, and harness their allosteric communication mechanism to modulate their functional processes. Specific applications to enzymatic and intracellular traffic machines using AI and Machine Learning approaches will illustrate such quantitative treatments of allosteric communication that generalize to address the modulation of broad spectrum of biomolecular functions.
Harel Weinstein, D.Sc. is the Maxwell Upson Professor of Physiology and Biophysics and Director of the Institute for Computational Biomedicine at Weill Cornell Medical College of Cornell University in New York City.
As a Tri-Institutional Professor, he holds professorial appointments at Rockefeller University, Sloan-Kettering Institute and Cornell University. His lab is devoted to studies in molecular and computational biophysics that address complex systems in physiology, and to the development and application of bioinformatics and AI/ML approaches to systems biology. The biomedical endpoints are signaling and neurotransmission in health and disease mechanisms, cancer, and with a recent special emphasis on translational aspects in ligand design and novel therapeutic modalities in combating infection. As the founding director of the Institute for Computational Biomedicine he has developed an academic and research unit responsible for a novel approach to biomedicine that involves the mathematical, physical, and computational sciences in combination with engineering and medical informatics, to seek a quantitative understanding of physiological function and disease, in an integrative, multi-scale approach based on gene structure and defects responsible for properties and behaviors at all levels–from protein, to cell, tissue and organ. He has received numerous honors and awards including election to Fellow of the Biophysical Society (FBPS, 2018), of the Physiological Society (FAPS, 2019), and of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (FAAAS, 2022). He served on the Executive Board of the International Society for Computational Biology and various Committees, was elected President of the Biophysical Society (2008) and served as Past President till 2011. He also served as President of the Association of Chairmen of Departments of Physiology, President of the International Society for Quantum Biology and Pharmacology, Chair of the Biophysics Section of the New York Academy of Sciences and Councilor of the Biophysical Society and of the New York Academy of Medicine.
