The Rosalie and Harold Rae Brown Center for Cancer Drug Development Seminar Series

The goal of our seminar series is to educate our faculty on various topics related to oncology drug discovery and development and share specific use cases featuring successes and failures.

Upcoming seminars

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Previous seminars

November 17, 2020 – The Prebys Center, An Academic Drug Discovery Enterprise – Capabilities and Partnering to Discover First in Class Small Molecule Therapeutics

Featuring

Michael R Jackson, PhD
Senior Vice President,
Drug Discovery and Development
Conrad Prebys Center for Chemical Genomics
Professor of Cancer,
Molecules and Structures Program,
NCI-Designated Cancer Center

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October 12, 2021 – “Do I have a drug target? How to Determine if Your Research Program is Ready for Drug Discovery”

Learn more about:

  • Determining when a target should be considered for drug discovery
  • Optimal data needed for initiating drug discovery program
  • Discuss a specific Oncology-related case study that succeeded and failed

Featuring

Iva Toudjarska, PhD

Vice President of Portfolio Operations at Xontogeny

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Tuesday, November 9, 2021 – How to Identify and Accelerate your Drug-like Molecule: High-Throughput Screening for Drug Discovery and Development of Small Molecules

Learn more about:

  • High-throughput and high-content screening of small molecule libraries
  • Assay selection and development for screening and validating hits
  • Discuss a use case of successes and failures

Featuring

Michael R Jackson, PhD
CCDD EAC member
Senior Vice President,
Drug Discovery and Development
Conrad Prebys Center for Chemical Genomics
Professor of Cancer,
Molecules and Structures Program,
NCI-Designated Cancer Center

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Monday, December 6, 2021 – Harvard Therapeutics Translation Initiative: Helping our Science Towards Tomorrow’s Medicine

Learn more about: Harvard Medical School’s recently launched Therapeutics Initiative, dedicated to optimizing and enabling the current ecosystem of discovery at the school to harness basic insights into clinical therapies.

The HMS therapeutics initiative supports 3 aims

  • Provide the expertise and resources to move our science toward a medicine
  • Continue to improve the science of translation
  • Train the inventors of tomorrow’s medicines

Featuring

Mark Namchuk, PhD
CCDD EAC member
Executive Director of Therapeutics Translation
Harvard Medical School

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January 25, 2022 – “Rational Design of Small Molecule Modulators of Transcriptome and Epitranscriptome”

Learn more about:

  • Virtual Screening and Cheminformatics
  • Machine Learning for Improving Permeability
  • Structure-Based Design of BRD4 Inhibitors
  • Structure-Based Design of METTL16 Inhibitors
  • Ligand-Based Hit-to-Lead Optimization
  • ChemDiv capabilities as a leading CRO in the area of medicinal chemistry

Featuring

Rouslan Michtchenko, MBA
Senior Business Development Director, ChemDiv

and

Alexei Pushechnikov, PhD
Vice President, Discovery Platforms, ChemDiv

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February 1, 2022 “Drug Discovery and Development of Biologics for Oncology Unmet Needs”

Learn more about:

  • Criteria for early target screening, selection, validation, optimization of antibodies and other polypeptide drugs
  • Discuss successful biologics in the clinic
  • Discuss successful case studies in biologics development

Featuring

Stefan Scherer, MD, PhD
CCDD EAC member
CEO, 3TBiosciences

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March 29, 2022 “How far can virtual drug design and screening take us? Accelerating lead discovery with V-SYNTHES, a new approach to Giga-Scale Virtual Screening of REAL Chemical Space”

Featuring

Vsevolod “Seva” Katritch, PhD
Associate Professor of Quantitative and Computational Biology and Chemistry
Michelson Center for Convergent Bioscience
Bridge Institute

Learn about:

  • Recent advances in structural biology, ultra-large libraries of drug-like compounds, and computational technologies, poised to revolutionize drug discovery
  • New iterative synthon-based approach for fast structure-based virtual ligand screening of billions of readily available (REAL) compounds (Sadybekov et al. Nature 2022)
  • Latest developments and applications of V-SYNTHES approach to lead discovery/optimization.
  • How V-SYNTHES can provide a cost-effective lead discovery entry for your target

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December 6, 2022 – “USC School of Pharmacy-Drug Discovery and Development Capabilities”

Featuring

Delisha Meishery-Patel, PhD
Associate Director of Research Affairs
USC School of Pharmacy

Learn more about:

  • Overview of the School of Pharmacy resources
  • What capabilities are offered and how to engage
  • Specific projects we have supported

To learn more, read the USC School of Pharmacy Cores brochure