EMBL-EBI Target2Patient Conference

European Bioinformatics Institute | EMBL-EBI's Targent2Patient conference took place beginning of this week at the Wellcome Genome Campus in Hinxton, Cambridge, where the Wellcome Sanger Institute is operating too.

Five key topics were covered, all of them being central to Quantum Biospace's TechBio transformation initiative :
1 New approaches to target selection
2 Novel biotools
3 Emerging modalities
4 Risk mitigation strategies
5 Informatics, computation and AI/ML

Let us share just one key learning per topic, provided by our Head of Biotech Business Development Florence Bosco who attended the conference.

- New approaches to target selection : David Hulcoop from Open Targets described human genetics and genomics approaches to gaining deep understanding of target-disease relationships and scoring targets link

- Novel biotools : Lorna Ewart from Emulate, Inc. and Prof Martin Knight from Queen Mary University of London shared about the importance of recapitulating biomechanical stimuli experienced by cells in human tissues, highlighting the benefits of using Complex In Vitro Models / Microphysiological Systems (CIVM/MPS) also called organ-on-chips (see IQ MPS Affiliate/FDA 2023 workshop report link)

- Emerging modalities : Emanuela Cuomo from AstraZeneca and Matthias Brand from Proxygen shared very educative content about the potential of molecular glues to unlock untractable targets involved in protein-protein interactions like transcription factors, scaffolding proteins, RNA-binding proteins, allowing to switch from the single targets binding pocket driven approach to protein complexes.

- Risk mitigation strategies: Dr Jack Scannell, very well known for his research about biopharmaceutical R&D efficiency, and coiner of Eroom's law, presented his last publication about the predictive validaty of models in drug discovery link

- Informatics, computation and AI/ML : Nicola Richmond from BenevolentAI described how they have used transformer-based LLMs to identify new targets, as well as Anthropic's Claude algo to surface the most important multimodal evidence supporting their target scoring tool with a view to making it explainable.

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