On Wednesday, March 29th, Hartaj Singh (Oppenheimer Senior Research Biotechnology Analyst) moderated a virtual Fireside Chat panel with Gain Therapeutics’ CTO Xavier Barril, Ph.D. and industry experts Brandon Allgood, Ph.D., former Chief Artificial Intelligence Officer of Valo Health, and Jason Paragas, Ph.D., Founder and Venture Partner at Social Impact Capital Fund.
The four sat down to discuss all things computational drug discovery as it relates to the future of biology, biopharma, and its connection to machine learning. The discussion began with a breakdown of drug discovery vs. drug engineering, tapped into what the experts saw for the future of the industry with AI and simulation, and brought it all home with where the two align.
Talking points included:
- Computational drug discovery for precision medicine – development of small molecules in more homogenous patient populations
- Merits of a combination of knowledge-based approaches (ML) and physics-based approaches
- Big Pharma perspective: technological solutions to discover, design, and develop therapeutics
- Mixed solvents MD (MDmix) simulations in structure-based drug discovery and GANX’s proprietary site-directed enzyme enhancement therapy (See-Tx™) platform to discover new allosteric binding sites
- Alignment of computation and biological experiments, e.g., GANX’s approach in GBA1-Parkinson’s and GBA1-Gaucher disease
