Symposium Brings Computer-Aided Drug Design Experts Together
More than 200 attendees joined in person or virtually for biannual event.
By Andrew Tie
June 29, 2023
The University of Maryland School of Pharmacy (UMSOP) hosted researchers interested in the field of drug design for the Computer-Aided Drug Design (CADD) Symposium on May 25 in Pharmacy Hall.
The symposium was designed to facilitate collaborations between the School’s CADD Center in the Department of Pharmaceutical Sciences (PSC) and other researchers at the University of Maryland, Baltimore, throughout the University System of Maryland, and beyond. The event targeted scientists who work with both small molecules and protein-based drugs, including graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, and researchers and educators from academia, government, and industry.
A collection of local and external speakers, including computational chemists and experimentalists, presented recent developments in drug design and development, as well as emerging areas of biology and chemistry that represent future drug discovery targets.
“The CADD Symposium showcases cutting-edge research that is pushing the frontiers of drug design and the future of health care,” said Alexander MacKerell, PhD, Grollman-Glick Professor of Pharmaceutical Sciences and director of the CADD Center.
Nearly 200 researchers from academia, government, and industry attended the symposium with virtual participants in Bangladesh, Ethiopia, France, India, Nigeria, Pakistan, the Philippines, and Turkey.
The day-long CADD symposium included oral and poster presentations, as well as the Ellis S. Grollman Lecture in Pharmaceutical Sciences. This year’s Grollman Lecture, titled “Leveraging Molecular Dynamics Simulations and AI Tools to Inform the Development of Safer Opioid Medications,” was given by Marta Filizola, PhD, dean of the Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences and Sharon & Frederick A. Klingenstein-Nathan G. Kase, MD Professor at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai.
The CADD Symposium is a biannual event supported, in part, by UMSOP with outside support from Early Charm Ventures and SilcsBio LLC.
“I was impressed with the symposium, which brought together prominent scientists in the CADD field and facilitated thoughtful discussion,” said Asuka Orr, PhD, a postdoctoral fellow at UMSOP who gave an oral presentation at the symposium. “CADD is becoming increasingly powerful in understanding and predicting the effects of drug molecules. The presentations at the symposium showed how combining computational and experimental techniques allows us to bridge knowledge gaps that cannot be addressed by experiments alone.”
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