ETH Meets Boston and ETH Alumni New England Chapter meets ETH
Chapter New England Alumni
The ETH Alumni New England Chapter (ETH Alumni NEC) had the opportunity to reconnect with delegates from the ETH during the 2019 ETH Meets Boston event held in the newly developed Vibrant Seaport district of Boston. About 80 people from the greater Boston scientific and business community, including 15 ETH Alumni, gathered to hear academic talks about the latest thinking on the topic: RETHINK Drug Discovery.
Recent advances in chemical synthesis, biological testing, and artificial intelligence (AI) allow for greater automation in the drug discovery process. AI systems that generate novel design suppositions as well as cope with multiple design objectives provide a basis for further automation in some aspects of drug discovery.
New Challenges
Automation could potentially accelerate time frames for compound design and optimization. It could also enable better decision making in early-stage pharmaceutical discovery that translates into late-stage clinical validation. However, such approaches also raise considerable conceptual, technical, and organizational challenges.
Academic Talks
Moderated by Susan Kish (a Boston-based executive, entrepreneur and great friend of Switzerland), this symposium brought together Aimee Usera (Senior Investigator, Novartis Institutes for BioMedical Research (NIBR)), Gisbert Schneider (Professor for Computer-Assisted Drug Design, ETH Zurich) as well as Connor W. Coley (Postdoc, Broad Institute, MIT) and Marcie Glicksman (Chief Scientific Officer, ORIG3N) to discuss the latest advances of this rapidly progressing field of science.
Great Conclusion
This was also a great opportunity for ETH Alumni to get together. Patrick Anquetil, President of the ETH Alumni NEC made a few introductory remarks. The event concluded with a cocktail reception sponsored by ETH Zurich where attendees continued to discuss the daring possibilities and limitations of drug discovery using machine intelligence while enjoying a hors d'oeuvres and a full bar.
