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| Dirk Ullmann of Evotec, a sponsor company at the marcus evans Discovery Summit 2015, talks about the latest trends and strategies in lead generation, and how to boost discovery success. |
LONDON, Mar 2, 2015 - (ACN Newswire) - "The drug discovery technology platforms should not be biased on a specific niche or technology, but be kept broad," advises Dirk Ullmann, Executive Vice President Lead Discovery, Evotec. "Despite new scientific approaches in the past 15 - 20 years, attrition remains high and success low. This must be addressed by the industry," he adds.
Evotec, a drug discovery solutions company, is attending the marcus evans Discovery Summit 2015, in Cascais, Portugal, 16 - 17 March.
- What are the latest trends and strategies in lead generation?
The latest trends are at the interface between phenotypic and target-directed approaches. With the advent of advanced third generation screening technologies, especially high-throughput imaging, including live-cell systems and the cascade of target deconvolution methods, approaches where the target is unknown are becoming more popular. Therefore, it is important to have disease-focused, precise and specific assay systems, a clever way to analyse multiparameter data and identify the driving elements that describe the compound's mode of action, together with the polypharmacology.
On the target side, both conventional high-throughput and structure-based drug design approaches continue to play a critical role.
- Does the phenotypic approach bring up new opportunities?
Yes. It helps avoid an early trap of narrowing down the mode of action to a very specific target that can be wrong in the end. A company could spend a lot of money and find out at the lead optimisation stage, or even later on, that the target it thought the compound would modulate is the "wrong one". This is one of the major issues impacting attrition. Keeping costs down and attrition low is a key objective.
Secondly, where the classical high-throughput or even structure-based approaches fail, a phenotypic approach can help scientists stay as close to the desired disease-relevant pharmacological profile in human as possible.
- What infrastructure would help take advantage of these opportunities?
Do not keep your technological platform too focused. The breadth of available technologies is huge and probably sufficient to address all the questions companies have from a screening perspective. As an example, in structure-based drug design new molecular interactions can address binding, kinetics and the thermodynamic interaction between binding partners, which are all critical areas.
A decent-sized compound library is required to find hits, but whether it is 50,000 or 1,000,000 compounds does not matter. It is much more important to focus on the diversity patterns and the quality of the library including well-thought-out hit expansion strategies. In addition, well designed cascade of screening approaches complementing classical screening methodologies, biophysical and imaging-based approaches are needed to make sense of the phenotypic screening hits.
- What mistakes could pharma companies avoid?
Most pharma companies are risk-adverse and do not explore enough the space of novel targets. We went through the genomic revolution, now we are still trying to solve the proteomics puzzle. The human proteome is meaningless if we cannot link it to function. Right now, companies are going after very similar targets, although the technologies allow them to deal with novel targets, mechanisms and disease function.
About the Discovery Summit 2015
The 15th annual Global Discovery Summit is the premium forum bringing elite buyers and sellers together. The two track summit offers early drug discovery and preclinical R&D professionals and specialist solution providers an intimate environment for a focused discussion of key new drivers shaping discovery research and development. Taking place at the Grande Real Villa Italia Hotel & Spa, Cascais, Lisbon, Portugal, 16 - 17 March 2014, the Summit includes presentations on revolutionising the pharma business model, boosting pipeline productivity, fuelling profitable partnerships, and exploiting current and emerging technologies to drastically reduce research timelines and improve costs.
For more information please send an email to press@marcusevanscy.com or visit the event website at www.discovery-summit.com/DirkUllmannInterview
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About Evotec
Evotec is a drug discovery solutions company providing drug discovery expertise and capabilities to pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies as well as to academic institutions. Drug discovery solutions are provided in form of fee-for-service work, integrated drug discovery alliances, development partnerships, licensing of innovative drug candidates and consulting arrangements. The Company operates worldwide and has leading scientific experts, state-of-the-art technologies as well as key therapeutic expertise in the areas of neuroscience, pain, metabolic diseases, oncology, inflammation and infectious diseases. www.evotec.com.
Contact:
Sarin Kouyoumdjian-Gurunlian
Press Manager, marcus evans, Summits Division
Tel: +357 22 849 313
Email: press@marcusevanscy.com
Topic: Press release summary
Source: marcus evans Summits
Sectors: Daily Finance, Daily News, BioTech
https://www.acnnewswire.com
From the Asia Corporate News Network
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