Shubham Sharma - Integrating experiments, energetics & structural informatics for de-risking of medicines

 Please join us for a joint BAGIM & SAGIM online event sponsored by CCDC.

Date: January 15, 2025
Time: 10 am PT/1 pm ET/6 pm BT
Speaker: Shubham Sharma

Title: Integrating experiments, energetics & structural informatics for de-risking of medicines

Abstract: A critical milestone in the development of a commercial drug product is the selection of the optimum solid form for the active pharmaceutical ingredient (API). Recently, the experimental methods to explore the solid form landscape have been supplemented by computational methods based on relative energies & structural informatics. In particular, the informatics-based assessment, dubbed as a “Health Check”, is a digital risk assessment that leverages a database of crystal structures to assign risk to the targeted solid form by comparing structural aspects of the target structure to databased-derived knowledge. Herein, I describe the use of few approaches to analyze four competing polymorphs of a myeloperoxidase (MPO) inhibitor with conformational flexibility and multiple plausible hydrogen bond networks.

Bio: Dr Shubham Sharma is a computational materials scientist at Pfizer and currently leads the solid form design center (SFDC) interface between Pfizer-CCDC for de-risking medicines using structural informatics-based techniques. Shubham joined Pfizer in 2022 and currently serves as a subject matter expert for various modeling deliverables at the Materials Sciences division. Shubham earned his PhD from Brown University, RI in 2021 followed by a postdoctoral fellowship at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, CA where he contributed to the field of computational catalysis, renewable energies, and material degradation.