Academic Drug Discovery 2016 Agenda

Registration, Coffee and Pastries

The DDU: 10 Years of Academic Drug Discovery: With a Lot of Help From Our Friends.
Paul Wyatt, Head of the Drug Discovery Unit, University of Dundee, United Kingdom

The talk will describe the capabilities of the Drug Discovery Unit at Dundee and two projects that have delivered optimised leads ready for preclinical development.

Chemical Biology Consortium Sweden Five Years on – Research Highlights
Annika Jenmalm Jensen, Consortium Director, CBCS Director, LCBKI, Karolinska Institutet, Sweden

Chemical Biology Consortium Sweden (CBCS) was established in 2010 as a government-funded, non-profit strategic resource for academic researchers across Sweden. CBCS collaborative projects have resulted in over 100 publications, 10 patents and 4 spin-off companies. A summary of CBCS working model and some of the research highlights will be presented.

Coffee and Networking in Exhibition Hall

Acceleration and Innovation in Drug Discovery Through Academic Collaboration
Timothy Hemesath, Director, Biotherapeutics Site Biology and Operations Lead, Centers for Therapeutic Innovation (CTI), Pfizer, United States of America

The CTI model of structured and transparent industry-academic collaboration is intended to accelerate the development of novel drugs in a way that leverages the strengths of academic discovery and industry infrastructure. A humanized antibody against Staphylococcal enterotoxin B, a toxin that contributes to the virulence of MRSA and can act as a superantigen and biological warfare agent, was developed and evaluated as a potential therapeutic agent.

Small Molecules That Stabilize And Activate Lipoprotein Lipase (LPL)
Mikael Elofsson, Professor, University of Umeå, Sweden

The presentation covers a screening-based approach to identify small molecules that stabilize and activate lipoprotein lipase, a key enzyme in lipid metabolism. A medicinal program led to improved compounds with efficacy in vivo.

Lightning Talks!

Lunch & Networking in Exhibition Hall

Poster Viewing Session

Technology Spotlight:
1Lambda RIDe: Bringing Kinetic Readout to your Microarray
Frank Schleifenbaum, Head of Product Management and Marketing, Berthold Technologies GmbH & Co. KG

Next generation microarray screening brings full kinetic information to the microarray world. Featuring the label-free 1Lambda-RIDe technology, the Berthold bScreen merges the world of microarray and label-free-technologies for a faster and more robust pharmaceutical screening with comprehensive kinetic characterization.

Angling Downstream For Next-Generation Hedgehog Pathway Antagonists
James Chen, Executive Director, HTBC, Stanford University, United States of America

Therapeutic strategies for Gli-dependent oncogenesis have primarily focused on Smoothened, a membrane receptor that regulates Gli function. Using high-throughput screens, we have discovered genetic drivers and chemical inhibitors that act downstream of Smoothened to control Gli activity.

The European Lead Factory – A Successful Model of Collaborative Drug Discovery
Stuart McElroy, Head of Biology, European Screening Centre Newhouse , University of Dundee, United Kingdom

The IMI - European Lead Factory is the first pharmaceutical and life sciences partnership of its kind, combining open innovation, crowdsourcing and contributions of several established pharmaceutical companies. Three years after the start, the first scientific results have been evaluated and an overview of the portfolio and case study of screening and triaging will be presented.

Direct, and extremely efficient, high density translational screening in animal models of disease
Richard Houghten, President, Torrey Pines Institute for Molecular Studies, United States of America

Coffee and Networking in Exhibition Hall

Opening "The Box of Delights" - Accessing Pharma to Enhance Academic Drug Discovery
Justin Bryans, Director of Drug Discovery, Medical Research Council Technology, United Kingdom

This presentation will describe some of the ground breaking collaborations between MRC Technology and various Pharma companies, highlighting why these are so important to each party, and how these collaborations will drive innovative drug discovery and deliver new treatments to patients.

Academic Drug Discovery: Opportunities For Challenging Targets In Oncology
Olivia Rossanese, Head of Biology and Reader, CR UK Cancer Therapeutics Unit, Institute of Cancer Research, United Kingdom

The Cancer Research UK Cancer Therapeutics Unit at the Institute of Cancer Research is a multidisciplinary drug discovery group with a focus on novel, high-risk targets in cancer. This class of targets comes with unique challenges, such as a higher target validation burden or increased technical risk, but presents distinct opportunities for discovering novel biology and innovative medicines.

Nanobody-enabled fragment screening on GPCRs
Jan Steyaert, Group Leader/Director, Vrije Universiteit Brussels, Belgium

Drinks Reception

End of Day 1

Coffee and Pastries

Targeting Protein-Protein Interactions in Oncology with Fragment Based Drug Discovery
Martin Drysdale, Head of Drug Discovery Programme, The Beatson Institute for Cancer Research, United Kingdom

In the Drug Discovery Programme at the Cancer Research UK Beatson Institute we are exploiting the basic biology strengths within the Institute and wider Cancer Research UK network, to investigate some of the most exciting and challenging cancer targets. This includes targeting mechanisms important in invasion and metastasis as well as highly validated but challenging protein-protein interaction (PPI) targets. I will describe our forays in this area which involve fragment based methods of hit identification coupled with structure based compound evolution.

A Multiplexed Cell Based Platform For Monitoring Cleavage In Different Compartments
Roland Wolkowicz, Associate Professor, San Diego State University, United States of America

We exploit fluorescent genetic barcoding for engineering cell-based platforms to monitor proteolytic cleavage, focusing on viral proteases and cleavage within the classical secretory pathway or at the cell surface by host enzymes. The platform is engineered as a tool for screening.

Coffee and Networking in Exhibition Hall

Advances In Open Innovation At AstraZeneca
David Smith, Principal Scientist, AstraZeneca R&D, United Kingdom

Open Innovation is now a common strategy for Pharma to work with academic drug discovery. Here I discuss two AstraZeneca collaborations spanning the value chain – Fyn kinase for Alzheimers Disease and inhibitors of Galphaq for oncology.

Institute For Applied Cancer Science, Developing The Next Generation Of Oncology Agents For Targeted Patient Populations
Philip Jones, Head of Drug Discovery, Institute for Applied Cancer Science. MD Anderson Cancer Center, University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, United States of America

The Institute for Applied Cancer Science (IACS) is a fully integrated drug discovery and development unit embedded within MD Anderson. By housing an innovative drug development operation within the world’s leading cancer center, we are surrounded by the culture of innovative academic science and clinical excellence for which MD Anderson is known.

Lunch & Networking in Exhibition Hall

Poster Viewing Session

The Centre For Therapeutic Target Validation – An Open Innovation Collaboration
Jessica Vamathevan, Centre for Therapeutic Target Validation (CTTV) Operations Director, GlaxoSmithKline, United Kingdom

The Centre for Therapeutic Target Validation (CTTV) is a pioneering public partnership which combines ground-breaking experimental and computational approaches to enable transformational change in the selection and validation of biological targets to reduce attrition in drug discovery.

Academics and academic institutions need to pull together, to help generate more novel medicines for patients
Chas Bountra, Chief Scientist, University of Oxford, United Kingdom

Academics and academic institutions need to pull together, to help generate more novel medicines for patients. Together, we are creating a new ecosystem for drug discovery. One which we believe will accelerate the generation of more novel medicines, more quickly. We hope these will also be more affordable.

Medicinal Chemistry in Academia – New Small Molecule Modulators for the Chemical Biology Toolbox
Marc Nazare, Group Leader Medicinal Chemistry, Leibniz-Institut für Molekulare Pharmakologie FMP, Berlin, Germany

The Chemical Biology platform at the Leibniz-Institut fuer Molekulare Pharmakologie (FMP) provides integrated access to HTS and Medicinal Chemistry hit-to-chemical tool development for academic projects on a collaborative basis. Current projects span from drug-repurposing efforts to the identification of chemical optimization of novel modulators of protein-protein interactions and phosphatase activity to the generation of imaging tools.

Coffee and Networking in Exhibition Hall

Chemical Proteomics: Accelerating Academic Target Discovery And Validation
Edward Tate, Professor of Chemical Biology, Imperial College London, United Kingdom

My group develops chemical biology approaches to identify and validate potential drug targets, particularly in the field of protein post-translational modification. In this talk I will present our recent research on developing chemical probes for protein lipidation, which has led to fundamental biological insights into the scope and roles of these modifications in disease biology, and to drug development projects in infection and cancer.

Stabilization of Protein-Protein Interactions
Christian Ottmann, Associate Professor, Technische Universiteit Eindhoven, Netherlands

Close of Conference