Discovery on Target 2025

In its 23rd year Discovery on Target continues to highlight “hot” drug targets and emerging modalities, technologies and strategies for pursuing those targets. The numerous conferences, symposia, courses and training seminars offer key insights for the successful discovery and development of novel therapeutics, from small molecules to biologics to chimeras and conjugates. The 4 day event covers innovations in target identification and lead generation, which includes cancer therapies, protein degradation, induced proximity, AI/machine learning, membrane proteins, translational models, synthetic biology and other relevant topics. New this year is an increased coverage of GLP-1, MASH and obesity, ADCs and bispecifics and on small molecules targeting DNA.

Direct-to-Biology Enabled Drug Discovery

Andrew Ratcliffe, CSO, Chemistry, Domainex Ltd.

Today there is a greater than ever emphasis on establishing rapid design-make-test (DMT) cycles to drive efficient drug discovery. To address this researchers have turned to the concept of Direct-to-Biology (D2B) and the screening of crude reaction mixtures. Despite some early pioneer publications D2B took hold during the PROTAC revolution. It has continued to gain momentum and successful case studies have now been published in the molecular glue space and outside degrader drug discovery. An exciting extension outside the biology domain is the profiling of crude reaction mixtures for ChromLogD, EPSA and microsomal turnover. Domainex is a leading CRO in the D2B area and this talk will describe its approach, the types of chemistry validated and examples of successful campaigns executed