Evolving Approaches to Early-Stage Drug Discovery (Z2) 2011

This meeting will cover multiple aspects of the challenges and opportunities facing drug discovery scientists. These challenges include: 1) diverse approaches to early stage discovery in a resource constrained environment, 2) evolution of preclinical drug discovery in academia, 3) evolution of drug leads/target validation from the NIH (MLPCN), 4) funding early stage/risky programs, 5) external licensing of programs and 6) advances in biomarkers/imaging to enable target selection and rapid go/no go decisions. The meeting goals are to bring together experts in all of these areas, present findings/opinions and initiate dialog on these topics. This would be the first meeting to bring together drug discovery scientists form big Pharma, biotech, academia, the MLPCN and Foundations each with unique missions and approaches and share their respective experiences.