Abstract

The overarching theme of this year’s conference, inspired by the ‘80s sci-fi film Back to the Future, aims to give delegates the chance to contemplate how we got to the present, examine new and emerging approaches and gaze into the crystal ball a little, in the hope of glimpsing a bright future for drug discovery.
The high failure rate between hit discovery and regulatory approval is economically unsustainable, so improvements in the process need to be made – but of most concern is that the majority of failures are due to lack of efficacy in the clinic. Hypothesis generation has clearly been too weak and consequently target validation poor – the evidence suggests using reductionist approaches alone has not yielded as many wins as was hoped for. The many gaps in our understanding of human biology, in both health and disease, at all levels, continue to hamper progress. Areas such as heterogeneity at the cell and human level and the importance of the microbiome are only just emerging. Of course, drug discovery is a very human endeavour not immune from the influence of current priorities and circumstantial pressures. It is naturally as much at the mercy of hype-cycles as it is the victim of dogma. The late Scottish psychologist RD Laing once said: “The range of what we think and do is limited by what we fail to notice. And because we fail to notice, there is little we can do to change until we notice how failing to notice shapes our thoughts and deeds.”
The application of the new technologies that are rapidly advancing in a wide range of areas, from stem cells and organoid biology, to single cell analysis and advanced computing, opens up the possibility of applying modern multi-scale and multi-mode approaches to interrogate complex biological systems in vitro that mimic key aspects of human biology, in a way that could only be dreamt of in the early days of drug discovery.