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Advancing Drug Discovery: A Webinar Series of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine

In progress

Any project, supported or not by a committee, that is currently being worked on or is considered active, and will have an end date.

Topics

This webinar series works with top educators, researchers (both academic and industrial), and government agencies in structural biology, medicinal chemistry, computational chemistry, and data science to facilitate improved educational breadth and communication across these fields. The specific goal of this webinar series is to develop the future generation of scientists that can expedite the drug discovery process across multiple therapeutic areas including current and emerging pandemic threats, neglected diseases, and other diseases affecting global health.

About Past Events

Description

Structure-based drug discovery is a highly multidisciplinary process requiring scientists with a wide variety of areas of expertise, including structural biologists, medicinal chemists, computational chemists, biochemists, data scientists, to name a few. It is the intersection of these disciplines that is so important in the optimal use of structural information for a therapeutic target to streamline the overall drug discovery process. It is critical that these scientists be able to communicate with one another effectively and efficiently; however, academic programs currently focus on training in a single discipline with little to no cross-discipline education.

As a nation, we must groom a future generation of U.S. scientists with strong expertise in their chosen field but with a clear understanding of the other disciplines required for the successful discovery of new drugs. This is both an urgent need and a national priority.

Planning Committee:

Dr. Ivet Bahar, Louis and Beatrice Laufer Endowed Chair

Director, Laufer Center for Physical & Quantitative Biology

Professor, Department of Biochemistry and Cell Biology

Renaissance School of Medicine, Stony Brook University, NY

Dr. Madan Babu, FRS, FMedSci

Chief Data Scientist Senior Vice President for Data Science

Member and George J. Pedersen Endowed Chair in Biological Data Science

Director, Center of Excellence for Data-Driven Discovery, Department of Structural Biology

St. Jude Children's Research Hospital, Memphis, TN

Dr. Vilmali Lopez-Mejias

Principal Scientist

Amgen

Dr. Leah Frye

Founder and President

LLFrye Consulting

Dr. Vsevolod “Seva” Katritch

Professor of Quantitative and Computational Biology, Chemistry and Pharmacology

University of Southern California

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