CoAS Seminar SeriesIntroduction to Small-Molecule Drug Discovery

Introduction to Small-Molecule Drug Discovery and the Application of Enabling Technology
Justin Dietrich, Principal Research Scientist II
AbbVie

Thursday, October 17, 2024

Drug discovery requires collaboration across many core disciplines including chemistry, biology, biophysics, pharmacology, medicine, informatics, and engineering with the overarching goal to develop new therapies that can improve the lives of people who have conditions of unmet medical need. Justin Dietrich will introduce you to the small-molecule drug discovery process and walk you through the iterative cycle medicinal chemists constantly navigate to design optimized lead compounds, to synthesize them via organic chemistry, and to analyze their properties in assays representative of a desired biological response. The last section of Dietrich's talk will describe the application of DNA-Encoded Library screening. In this technology, large collections of individual small-molecules attached to DNA barcodes are screened against a biological target of interest and then decoded using next generation sequencing.