Abstract

The disruptive technologies of Genomics, Functional Genomics and Artificial Intelligence are being applied to better understand disease leading to the identification and validation of novel drug targets. Through identifying novel targets with human validation and a direct line of sight to bespoke patient populations it is anticipated that overall industry success rates will increase due to reduced attrition both preclinically and in Phase 2. However the transition to target novelty has resulted in a major challenge to the discovery scientist as many of these targets are unprecedented in terms of drug discovery and may be intractable to small molecule discovery. This has led to an explosion in the number of therapeutic modalities within pharma portfolio with the ambition of enabling the discovery of a medicine to any target. For scientists engaged in small molecule discovery this is leading to a resurgence in affinity screening assays, which when combined with the recent advances in PROTACs technology offers the ability to rapidly progress novel targets into discovery. In this presentation I will describe our approach at AstraZeneca to this challenge.