Keynote Lecture
Moving the Goalposts – Case Studies in Academic Drug Discovery from the G-INCPM

The non-biased process of identifying chemical compounds with pharmaceutical application has traditionally been associated with industry, rather than basic academic research. However due to the high infrastructure costs and a difficulty to predict a successful outcome at the initial early discovery stage, the trend has been for progressively limiting pharmaceutical industry activities in this area. Nevertheless, many drugs originate from this process and high throughput screening has now become commonplace in small and medium biotechnology enterprises as well as in academic facilities attempting to bridge between basic research and industrial development.

The Nancy and Stephen Grand Israel National Center for Personalized Medicine (G-INCPM) was established as a facility to advance academic, clinical, and industrial research with an emphasis on genetic and proteomic data generation and analysis. The G-INCPM stresses collaborations through high-end technology centers in fields where access to these technologies may be limiting the impact of basic research. Within G-INCPM, The Maurice and Vivienne Wohl Institute for Drug Discovery provides a flexible platform for bioassay development and small molecule discovery for targeted and phenotypic compound screening. A clear need has emerged from the academic community for chemical biology tools to advance basic research questions and for better small organic probe compounds which could be leveraged for drug development. In the talk I will discuss the challenges we have encountered in many of our collaborations and specifically during the discovery novel inhibitors of the lipid phosphatase Synaptojanin 2, and the Nicotinamide N-Methyl Transferase. Finally, I will introduce the OpenScreen, which is a new multi-national EU-based consortium that collects diverse chemical libraries from academic laboratories across Europe into a single resource and is deployed to national screening centers in member states.