About BAGIM

BAGIM is an active community of Boston area scientists bringing together people from diverse fields of modeling and informatics to impact life and health sciences. BAGIM strives to create a forum for great scientific discussions covering a wide range of topics including data management, visualization, computational chemistry, drug discovery, protein structure, molecular modeling, structure-based drug design, data mining, software tools, and the sharing of goals and experiences. Our community is made up of participants from academia, government, and industry whose goal is to engage in the discussion of science involving a synthesis of theory and technology. Discussions sponsored by BAGIM are targeted to the needs and interests of informatics scientists, computational chemists, medicinal chemists, and statisticians. BAGIM also provides opportunities for networking within these disciplines as well as an arena for the dissemination of information of specific interest to the membership.

Monday, May 1, 2017

BAGIM Event: Drs. Andrew Hopkins and Scott Brown at the Broad Institute in Cambridge, Wednesday May 17th, starting at 6pm.

Dr. Andrew Hopkins of Exscientia Ltd and the University of Dundee and Dr. Scott Brown of Sunovion Pharmaceuticals Inc. will present "Artificial Intelligence approaches to designing psychiatric drugs" on Wednesday, May 17th at the Broad Institute at 415 Main Street in Cambridge, starting at 6pm. Networking and refreshments will follow the talk at Meadhall at 4 Cambridge Center.  Please RSVP for this event.
Abstract:
Investment in drug discovery for psychiatric disease has been in significant decline due to the challenges of translating drugs from the laboratory to the clinic. Our deepening understanding of the genomics of psychiatric diseases holds the promise of better translational to the clinic. However, the price of our deeper understanding is an increase in the complexity of the drug discovery process for new psychiatric drugs. The polygenic model of psychiatric diseases suggests there maybe few stand-alone, individual drug targets. The translational crisis in psychiatric drug discovery requires entirely new ways of thinking about drug discovery. Historically, most treatment options we have today for psychiatric illnesses act on multiple central nervous system (CNS) drug targets, via polypharmacology. Until now successful, multi-target CNS drugs were not designed rationally, but were often discovered by phenotypic screening or clinical observations. Therefore, we need to consider complex ‘target product profiles’ for new medicines that deliberately work by synergy and emergent behavioural properties, by acting on multiple drug targets or by direct phenotypic perturbation. To tackle the complexity in psychiatric drug discovery, Exscientia and Sunovion are collaborating to develop and validate an Artificial Intelligence (A.I.) platform to design drugs rationally against complex ‘target product profiles’ defined by high-content phenotypic and multi-target objectives. We shall describe in this presentation our on-going work on the development of the next generation of psychiatric drugs, that are being designed by algorithm.
BAGIM is sponsored by Dassault Systemes, DNASTAR, LabAnswer, OpenEye Scientific, Schrodinger, Silicon Therapeutics, Acellera, Acpharis, Cambridge Crystallographic Data Centre, Chemical Computing Group, Dotmatics, Cresset, Cyrus Biotechnology, Optibrium, Team Arrayo, and Scilligence