TUESDAY, APRIL 5
7:30 am Breakfast Presentation (Sponsorship Opportunity Available) or Morning Coffee
8:50 Chairperson’s Opening Remarks
Phillips Kuhl, President, Cambridge Healthtech Institute
9:00 Establishing Collaborative Networks to Develop Broad Spectrum Antibacterial Agents with Encapsulated IP
Lance Stewart, CEO, BioStructures, Emerald BioStructures
Our Seattle Structural Genomics Center for Infectious Disease (www.ssgcid.org) is funded by NIAID and produces 100’s of X-ray crystalstructures of infectious disease protein targets, establishing a “blueprint for structure guided drug design”. We have established a network of investigators and resources to pursue cost effective collaborative discovery or new small molecule antibiotic candidates with broad spectrum activity. Importantly, we are taking innovative tech transfer measures to ensure co-invented IP protection to ensure monetization life after lead discovery.
Sponsored by
9:30 SCYNEXIS’ Global Health Technologies & Capabilities to Encourage the Development of ND Therapeutics
Yves Ribeill, Ph.D., President and CEO, SCYNEXIS, Inc.
SCYNEXIS, Inc. delivers innovative drug discovery and development solutions to our pharmaceutical and global health partners. Our success is demonstrated by the eleven pre-clinical and clinical drug candidates that we have delivered to our partners over the last five years. SCYNEXIS is now offering its established expertise and technologies to life science organizations who are interested in participating in an effort to bring the best technology forward to address global health challenges.
10:00 Networking Coffee Break, Poster and Exhibit Viewing
10:40 Open Source for Neglected Diseases: Challenges and Opportunities
Hassan Masum, Ph.D., Results for Development Institute
Open source approaches have had remarkable success in creating software and enabling mass collaboration. Results for Development is undertaking a landscaping project to better understand open source approaches for research and development for neglected diseases, and their potential to lower costs and R&D time frames, increase collaboration, and build a knowledge commons. This presentation will address several questions:
- Why is open source and collaborative innovation important?
- What does "open source" really mean, and how has it been used for neglected diseases?
- What challenges do we face in applying open source methods?
- What opportunities can we co-create for using open source methods?
11:10 Collaborative Drug Discovery: A Platform for Transforming Neglected Disease R&D and Beyond
Sean Ekins, Ph.D., Collaborations Director, Collaborative Drug Discovery, Inc.
Collaborative drug discovery (CDD) is an evolving paradigm for biomedical research and can be facilitated by computational tools. We have developed a web-based software that handles a broad array of data types, enabling archiving and selective sharing. This has enabled us to collect small molecule datasets on TB and malaria (from pharmas and academics) and use it to provide new insights into their molecular properties. These datasets have in turn enabled computational models for TB that demonstrate 4-10 fold enrichment in finding active compounds. We present new approaches to facilitating collaborations, collecting and mining data to prioritize new molecules for testing against neglected diseases.
11:40 Breaking IP Barriers to Accelerate Drug R&D: The Pool for Open Innovation against Neglected Tropical Diseases
Don Joseph, COO, BIO Ventures for Global Health
The pool for open innovation against Neglected Tropical Diseases motivates innovative and efficient drug discovery and development by opening access to intellectual property or know-how in neglected tropical disease research.
12:10 End of Conference