Day 1 — How best to enable Externalisation of Drug Discovery

The last few years have seen an increasing trend out outsource screening, initially chemistry and selected assays but increasingly entire integrated hit to lead programs with entire research areas being "virtualised". This poses several challenges to "traditional" Pharma screening IT environments which were often not designed to allow and coordinate inter-company screening activities.

At this session we will hear from industry experts on strategies to enable and support this changing landscape. This session will be an interactive, part presentation, part debate and part open discussion on how best to achieve this.

Speakers:
Nick Lynch — AstraZeneca and Pistoia Alliance
Anthony Carlo — Integrated Sourcing Lead, Pfizer

Please note: — The informatics sessions are designed to be of interest and easy to follow by drug discovery scientists of all disciplines. Talks are geared towards showing practical solutions rather than technical details.

Day 2 — Knowledge at your finger tips

At today's session you will hear about cutting edge, open tools for use by scientists to share, find and create information and knowledge. In order to effectively locate, interpret, link and cross reference results, information needs to be stored in a rich, standardised, computer friendly formats — these are often human unfriendly to create and use. Now innovative, opensource tools and standards are emerging which hold the promise to deliver these advantages in scientist friendly applications.

Speakers:
OpenPhacts — Dr. Stefan Renner, Novartis.
OpenISA — Dr. Susanna-Assunta Sansone, University of Oxford eResearch Centre “Community-standards for reproducible and reusable research: fundamentals and challenges"

Please note: — The informatics sessions are designed to be of interest and easy to follow by drug discovery scientists of all disciplines. Talks are geared towards showing practical solutions rather than technical details.