February 7-11, 2026
Thomas Michael Menino Convention & Exhibition Center (MCEC)
Boston, MA, USA
February 7-11, 2026
Thomas Michael Menino Convention & Exhibition Center (MCEC)
Boston, MA, USA
Characterizing and understanding the interactions of potential therapeutic agents with their targets is fundamental to drug discovery. After first reviewing the fundamentals of pharmacology, we will conduct an in-depth exploration of pharmacology assays and screening funnels as they apply to the validation of hits and their optimization into clinical candidates. A key aim will be to distill important, but often poorly known, pharmacology and screening information in a concise format.
This course will surface pitfalls and offer mitigations strategies on a range of relevant topics with a goal of providing practical information to help prosecute drug discovery projects more effectively from project inception all the way to clinical trials.
Attendees will leave this course with:
Fabien Vincent, PhD
Pfizer
Fabien Vincent, PhD, is an Research Fellow in the Hit Discovery and Lead Profiling Group at Pfizer. His laboratory provides molecular pharmacology support for the small molecule project portfolios of the Immunology & Inflammation research unit. This work includes designing hit identification strategies and screening funnels, developing assays for high throughput screening as well as additional assays to elucidate the structure activity relationship of active compounds, understand their mechanism of action and facilitate translation to pre-clinical models. His main research interests are centered on improving the translation of discovery research to patients and specifically include phenotypic screening and atypical molecular mechanisms of action.
Vincent received a Diplôme d’Ingénieur in organic chemistry from CPE Lyon (France) before conducting graduate research in the fields of chemical biology and enzymology in the laboratory of Harold Kohn at the University of Houston. He later became a post-doctoral fellow in chemical biology at the Genomics Institute of the Novartis Research Foundation in San Diego. He entered the field of drug discovery as both a drug discovery research project leader and molecular pharmacology-biochemistry group leader.
He recently led a team of Pfizer scientists in analysis of how best to approach phenotypic screening, and specifically how to design the optimal phenotypic assays, those which can best predict compounds and mechanisms that will be effective in patients (Sci. Trans. Med., 2015, 7, 293ps15) as well as how to approach the triage and validation of phenotypic screening hits (Cell Chem. Bio., 2020, 27, 1332).
He was also a co-organizer of the 2019 Keystone Symposium “Phenotypic Drug Discovery: Recent Advances and Insights from Chemical and Systems Biology” surveying progress and advances in the field of phenotypic drug discovery. (Nat. Rev. Drug Discov., 2022, https://doi.org/10.1038/s41573-022-00472-w)