More chairs had to be brought in for the large audience!
Cercia fellow Dr Xiaoli Li presents his research during the lunch time poster session
Dr Stephen Pickett, GlaxoSmithKline, presenting his talk on "Multi Objective Evolutionary approaches to Drug Discovery"
On Thursday 2nd March, 2006, Cercia hosted a one day workshop on Computational Intelligence techniques and their applications in chemistry. The workshop was attended by over sixty delegates from academia and industry, including invited guest lecturers from GlaxoSmithKline, Unilever and Dow Chemicals. The aim of the event was to forge closer links between industry and academia in this particularly lucrative and rapidly changing subject.
Computational Intelligence techniques have been used in the identification and selection of drugs since the early 1990s. The use of such methods is now practically ubiquitous across the larger pharmaceutical companies, though still not as high profile as it could be, given the substantial potential of this area of research.
Computational intelligence techniques are primarily used to improve the efficiency of high-throughput processes such as the early-stage screening of new drug candidates. Such screening helps to produce highly accurate candidate lists from databases of millions of known drugs. CI techniques can also be used to predict the efficiency of bactericidal chemicals, and to detect for potential conflicts between novel drugs and chemicals found in the human body without the need for costly clinical trials.
All of these applications save millions of pounds, reduce wasted time and ultimately shorten the time-to-market for the next generation of chemical products. Given that the cost of taking a drug to market is estimated at around $800m US, such cost savings are making the larger companies take notice of CI techniques, which is great news for those of us at the forefront of research in this area.
Speakers & Presentations
The speakers for the day included:
- Dr Steven Barrett, GlaxoSmithKline - Evolving Predictors of Molecule-Cytochrome Interaction for Drug Discovery
Download Presentation [PDF] - Dr Elizabeth Colbourn, Intelligensys Ltd - Data Mining for Product Formulation Using Neural Computing
Download Presentation [PDF] - Dr Stephen Pickett, GlaxoSmithKline - Multi Objective Evolutionary approaches to Drug Discovery
Download Presentation [PDF] - Dr Roy Johnston, School of Chemistry, University of Birmingham - Computational Nanoscience: From Clusters to Proteins via Nature-inspired Computation
Download Presentation [PDF] - Dr Elsa Jordaan, Dow Chemical Company - Computational Intelligence in the Chemical Industry
- Dr Thorsten Schnier, Cercia - Applications of Evolutionary Computation in the Pharmaceutical Industry: The Cercia Perspective
Download Presentation [PDF] - Ian Stott, Unilever Research - Using Genetic Algorithms to Design and Patent Bactericidal Peptides
Download Presentation [PDF] - Dr Wendy Warr, Wendy Warr & Associates - Can discover informatic cure the ills of pharmaceutical R&D?
Download Presentation [PDF]
Abstracts for the talks are available [PDF]
You can still view the original publicity for the day including the programme.
Interested in other courses workshops?
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