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