Cambridge Healthtech Institute’s 20th Annual

Fragment-Based Drug Discovery

Towards Small Molecule Therapeutics from Smaller Hits on ‘Difficult Targets’

April 15 - 16, 2025 ALL TIMES PDT

Over the past two decades, fragment-based drug discovery (FBDD) has earned its place as a premier strategy for discovering new small molecule drug leads. Fragment screening is especially useful for finding hits against the growing number of medically relevant ‘featureless’ or ‘flat’ protein targets such as protein-protein interaction (PPI) drug targets. Close to 70 drug candidates are in clinical trials and at least 7 marketed medicines originated from fragment screens. Despite the growing success of fragment-based lead design (FBLD), the process has many steps—such as detecting fragment binding, prioritizing fragment hits, growing the fragment into leads—that are benefitting from technological advances. The emerging field of targeted protein degradation (TPD) has also expanded applications of fragment approaches. At CHI’s 20th Annual Fragment-Based Drug Discovery conference, the oldest fragment-focused conference in the industry, we invite you to continue to celebrate and collaborate with other FBDD experts in both the pharmaceutical industry and academia. Explore cutting-edge strategies, share experiences, and tackle the ongoing challenges in advancing fragments to successful drug candidates.