Session: Advances in Drug Discovery Processes (including HTE)

Drug discovery is the process of finding and characterizing molecules that can treat disease. The goal is to create safe and effective medicines via target identification, assay development, lead optimization, preclinical research, clinical research, regulatory review, and post-market safety monitoring to improve people's lives. The collaboration across multiple disciplines is essential. Outstanding challenges such as high attrition rate, low investment returns, antibiotic resistance, and new challenges from public health emergency and post pandemic era, have provided unprecedented collaboration opportunities for STEM-medicine to innovate and expedite the drug discovery processes. This track welcomes abstracts addressing not only the latest scientific developments in drug discovery associated technologies but also the management, commercial and regulatory issues that increasingly play a part in how R&D is planned, structured, and executed, and how streamlined regulatory approach is applied to expedite the regulatory review and inspection process to make safe and high-quality medicines accessible to the public. Relevant topics include, but is 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, protein structure engineering approaches, machine learning and AI technologies, and advanced data science to expedite drug discovery processes, and to streamline subsequent development and regulatory approval for the ultimate purpose to maximize public health impacts are especially encouraged.