Highlights from the Discngine Meetup Vol.3: The Evolving Needs in New Drug Modalities
Every year since 2021, Discngine has organized its annual meetup event, bringing together our customers and partners to exchange the constant challenges faced by experts in research informatics.
For this edition, we gathered seven speakers who are experts in the field to present their work and exchange ideas during an extensive roundtable discussion. They shared their expertise and experience with our community about the new drug modalities and the challenges they represent for the scientific informatics world.
This year's Discngine Meetup Vol. 3, entitled "New Drug Modalities: Evolving Needs in Scientific Informatics," featured an insightful agenda, including:
A plenary introduction to drug modalities from a drug design perspective
A talk on the development of a new in-house biologics platform
A roundtable discussion surrounding its current and future outlook in the industry
In this article, we provide a succinct summary of each of these discussions and the opportunity to watch their replay videos.
Join us for a virtual Discngine Meetup Vol. 4 this year in October!
Explore the topic of biotherapeutic developability assessment with drug discovery industry experts!
Dr. Leonardo de Maria, Principal Scientists at AstraZeneca, introduced the topic with a drug design perspective during the plenary session as new drug modalities have been evolving to this day.
This introduction covered the reasons why target selection is the most important decision regarding drug discovery and the many different considerations companies take into account when picking modalities.
Dr. Leonardo de Maria also went into discussion of how each modality is represented such as small molecules, PROTACS, peptides, etc. and how the industry is evolving as the structural drug design process gets access to new types of structural information such as Alphafold models.
After the in-depth introduction of how drug modalities have been developing, our event continued with Dr. Yves Fomekong Nanfack, Head of End to End AI Foundations. Large Molecules Research Platform at Sanofi. During his presentation, he gave us a detailed view of building the next digital biologics discovery platform for internal use. He further discussed how they tackle problems such as how digital approaches can identify building blocks to building complex molecules and the process of this transformation in drug discovery.
He presented the challenges that they are now solving to capture and access data. He also described internally developed methods, like their program leveraging AI to predict structures of large molecules.
Our event continued with a talk on data science for new modalities by Dr. Barbera Brannetti, who detailed the opportunities and challenges the industry is facing.
Dr. Barbara Brannetti, Director Data Science, Characterization and Formulation at Novartis Institutes for BioMedical Research (NIBR), started a talk by discussing the key steps in the biologics drug discovery process and the challenges of each step. These include how to select the right technology and how to analyze the data. The whole process is long since it often needs to be designed from scratch. Dr. Brannetti further discussed how the data science team deals with these diverse and complex modalities.
Continuing the discussion, it was time for our roundtable of speakers to have an open discussion on the topic. Our chair, Dr. Thierry Dorval, Head of Sciences & Data management at Servier, was accompanied with our 4 panelists, Dr. Phillipe Archambault, Application Scientist at Chemical Computing Group (CCG), Dr. Kenneth Longo, Vice President, Discovery Data Science at Wave Life Sciences, Dr. Barbara Brannetti, and Dr. Lars Brive, Cheminformatics Data Scientists at AstraZeneca, who are all experts in their field and brought different perspectives to this topic.
They discussed the most prominent challenges that they face, as coming from different companies whose objectives and capabilities differed. These challenges consisted of legacy systems, the acceleration of the development of modalities, how should people in the industry adapt to this rapid development and many more topics that resonated with the audience.
A Close to Real-life Experience
As the first part of our event ended, we concluded our event with a virtual networking session. This was possible through gather.town, a platform where participants were able to walk around the virtual space and connect with other attendees. This facilitated communication between all participants and speakers, continuing the exchange of ideas.
To further provide a real-life experience, during each Meetup, we organize a virtual exhibition where our partners showcase their materials for everyone in the audience to see.
In addition, we wanted our event to bring a positive outcome to the real world. Therefore, we are happy to have partnered with GlobalGiving to provide donations again this year. At last year’s Meetup, we were able to donate to different charities and this year, we will continue with this transformative action by continuing to give.
Conclusion
To summarize, our event brought together the Discngine community to discuss new drug modalities and to be a part of the conversation. Our speakers gave their firsthand experience of each topic, which sparked further discussions within the audience.
Based on this success, we will continue with Meetup Vol.4 next year! Join us and see what new topic we will discuss.
*** Update: Discngine Meetup Vol. 4 will cover the topic of Innovative strategies for biotherapeutic developability assessment. Join our community of drug discovery scientists and IT experts to get valuable insights and network!