Advances in Drug Discovery Processes (including HTE): Protein Engineering Approaches with Target Therapeutic Applications

Drug discovery process involves multiple scientific disciplines, such as biology, chemistry, pharmacology, toxicology, statistics, data science, and computation, among others. Drug discovery field has progressed slowly due to factors such as high attrition rate, low investment returns, etc. Meanwhile, serious issues, such as antibiotic resistance generated during clinical usage and challenges encountered during prolonged global pandemics and post pandemics era undoubtedly continue to threaten global public health in an unprecedented fashion. Therefore, accelerating drug discovery processes via innovation has become prominent. This session welcomes abstracts addressing the latest advances in drug discovery via experimental, computational, and data-driven approaches that enable discovery of small molecule pharmaceuticals, biologics, vaccines, and peptide formulations. It includes new approaches to ligand generation, target identification and validation, screening of libraries and selection of new hits, as well as lead identification and optimization, etc. Relevant topics include, but are not limited to, studies involving improvements to existing methods and applications of innovative methods in rational drug design, structure-activity relationships, drug repurposing, molecular screening, phenotypic screening, metabolic pathway analysis, chemical diversity generation, reaction prediction, bioinformatics, genomics, metabolomics, and other related “omics” fields. Studies integrating advanced techniques, such as high-through sequencing technologies, machine learning, artificial intelligence technologies, and advanced data science to expedite drug discovery processes via protein engineering approaches with target therapeutic applications are especially encouraged.