Abstract
Pharmacophores are abstract descriptions of the properties of drug-like molecules that are necessary to understand how they interact with their biological target and hence, characterize their medical action. Mastering pharmacophores is essential for pharmaceutical science but this concept is very hard to grasp. This is mainly due to the difficulty of perceiving the three-dimensional aspect of pharmacophore models but also their combinatorial nature. We therefore designed Escape from PharmaZ, a hybrid serious game for undergraduate students. It is composed of a collaborative board game and a dedicated Augmented Reality (AR) smartphone application that allows the students to visualize and manipulate 3D molecular structures. The preliminary tests of this game, with 24 volunteers, show that it helps understand the pharmacophore concept, especially for novices in chemistry. The results also show that the game mechanics and the AR rendering help players better understand the nature of pharmacophore features and the importance of their spatial and combinatorial positioning.
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Acknowledgements
This project was financed by Université Rennes and the project AIR. It was also supported by the labex DYNAMO (11-LABX-0011) and ANR project PIRATE (ANR-21-CE45-0014). We thank the entire team: Louis Ernenwein (project manager), Ghislain Nouvel (IT development), David Baya (graphic design), Bastien Cravi (UX designer), Julien Lassimonne (educational engineer), Audrey Lachal (educational engineer & game design) and Bertrand Marne (serious game designer). We also thank Florent Barbault for his expertise in pharmacophores, all the early players of the game and Anthony Roussel for the video capture.
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Marfisi, I. et al. (2025). Escape from PharmaZ: A Game to Boost Pharmacophore Learning Through Immersive Augmented Reality. In: Schönbohm, A., et al. Games and Learning Alliance. GALA 2024. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 15348. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-78269-5_30
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