Future Directions in Medicinal Chemistry
Co-organized by: Boston Area Group for Informatics and Modeling (BAGIM) and Novartis
Abstract
BAGIM
Medicinal chemistry is a challenging research area crossing multiple scientific boundaries. Finding and optimizing chemical entities toward obtaining a drug candidate is a process in which complex and multi-factorial problems are addressed. Not only those compounds need to be synthetically feasible, but they also need to fulfil an acceptable balance between potency, efficacy, and safety, while being innovative enough to be marketable.
A medicinal chemist as of today needs to be knowledgeable on different fields, in order to work effectively with other scientists on a drug discovery campaign. What is more, good data hunting and analysis ability are important along with strong communication skills to allow efficient internal and external collaborations.
Much progress has been made to support the various stages of early drug discovery workflows. High throughput experimental techniques, lab automation, and computational prediction tools hold big promises and are still actively developed in pretty much all domains involved in drug research programs, which suggests that there is still much room for improvement.
In this panel discussion, we want to discuss what are the main challenges medicinal chemists still face in their research as of today, and among those challenges, which ones would deserve more attention to improve the efficiency of drug discovery research programs. Overall, what would a happy medicinal chemist look like within the next 10 years?
Agenda
30 minutes Keynote from Derek Lowe, Director in Chemical Biology Therapeutics at Novartis Institutes for BioMedical Research (NIBR) and author of the widely-read industry science and industry web site "In the Pipeline" (http://pipeline.corante.com).
20 minutes intervention from Anthony Donofrio, Senior Scientist, Medicinal Chemistry at Merck
20 minutes intervention from Peter Schmidtke, Product Manager of 3decision at Discngine and co-creator of Fpocket: An open-source platform for ligand pocket detection.
20 minutes intervention from Connor W. Coley, Chemical Engineering at MIT with research interests in Machine Learning and autonomous discovery
20 minutes open discussion and questions from the audience.
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