Emerging Technologies for Discovery Chemistry

Cambridge Healthtech Institute’s Emerging Technologies for Discovery Chemistry conference focuses on the biophysical methods driving the renaissance in small molecule drug discovery. Many disease targets are protein complexes that lack enzymatic activity and cannot therefore be screened with traditional high throughput cell-based assays. Biophysical-based screening methods detect ligand-target binding rather than enzymatic activity of the target and thereby enable identification of new chemical matter against a wider range of disease targets such as intracellular protein-protein interactions (PPIs) that comprise many cancer, immunological and neurological disease targets. We convene medicinal, biophysical chemists, and structural biologists to discuss technologies such as nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR), surface plasmon resonance (SPR) and mass spectrometry (MS). Covalent strategies, cryo electron microscopy (cryoEM) and the use of affinity-selection mass spectrometry (ASMS), will also be a focus.