Advances in Drug Discovery Processes (including HTE)

Drug discovery processes involve multiple disciplines, including biology, chemistry, pharmacology, toxicology, statistics, data science, and computation, among others. Recently, progress in drug discovery has been slow due to high attrition rates, low investment returns, and myriad other challenges. Meanwhile, serious issues like antibiotic resistance generated during clinical usage and continued evolution of pandemic-inducing viruses like SARS-CoV-2 and its variants undoubtedly continue to threaten global public health. Therefore, accelerating drug discovery processes via innovation has become prominent. This session welcomes abstracts addressing the latest advances in experimental, computational, and data-driven approaches that enable discovery of small molecule pharmaceuticals, biologics, vaccines, and peptides. 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; studies involving improvements to and applications of methods in rational drug design, structure-activity relationships, drug repurposing, molecular screening, phenotypic screening, metabolic pathway analysis, chemical diversity generation, protein expression and purification, reaction prediction, bioinformatics, genomics, metabolomics, and other related “omics” fields; integration of advanced techniques such as high-throughput sequencing technologies, machine learning, artificial intelligence, or data science to expedite drug discovery processes and facilitate regulatory assessment towards manufacturing, etc.