Thankfully for the One Nucleus community, the Genesis in-person meeting on 9th December was able to proceed amidst disruption caused by news of the Omicron variant. Around 200 delegates from biotech, academia, pharmaceutical and associated industries made the most of an end-of-year opportunity to network and exchange ideas at the home of the Royal Society of Medicine in London. Rachel Pearce, Associate Director of Business Development, attended on behalf of Domainex and thoroughly enjoyed the event and the chance to discuss science with old acquaintances and new.

There was much reflection on lessons learned during the past year of the global response to the COVID-19 pandemic including fast track approval and successful roll-out of a mass vaccination program. Flic Gabbay, tranScrip, provided an insightful overview of take-away learnings covering the repurposing of drugs for alternative therapies, public health and clinical trials. She went on to discuss how these learnings can be applied to future research programs. It was emphasized that many of the advancements were only possible due to the multidisciplinary collaboration that accelerated these initiatives. There was also agreement that the pandemic led to a much greater understanding of the drug discovery process and awareness about clinical trials in society, with many panelists seeing these as important topics for future education.

Looking forward, the program included a discussion on the rapidly advancing field of genomics and its progression of diagnostics and precision medicine applications. Genomics is seen as a key piece of information in patient stratification and the design of better clinical trials, but also an area of great challenge in utilizing the enormous amount of data it is generating.

Use of data was a resonating theme in many discussions, from the conflicting conclusions of collective clinical trial data, to improved data modelling in driving decision making and reducing risks to organizations and patients, as well as the barriers that are caused by limited access to data and underrepresented populations in data sets.

There was also time to focus on innovations of the future with an expectation to see a growing proportion of launches in the developing fields of cell and gene therapy, and greater collaboration and inter-disciplinary engagement to validate new targets and pioneer new drug modalities. With thanks to One Nucleus for a fantastic event, we look forward to future meetings in 2022. If you were unable to speak to us at Genesis but would like to find out about Domainex’s integrated drug discovery CRO services, get in touch now.