Driving Drug Discovery: The Innovation Podcasts

Episode Guide

• Episode 1: De-Risking Therapeutic Candidates with Off-Target Screening
• Episode 2: Rethinking Mass Spectrometry for Drug Discovery
• Episode 3: Using Early Biomarker Discovery to Secure Clinical Success
• Episode 4: Driving Deeper Insights into Structure-Based Drug Design with Cryo-EM
• Episode 5: Why Failure Can Be a Faster Path to Success
• Episode 6: Confessions of a Hit Man: Matching Target Strategies to the Need

Episode 6

Confessions of a Hit Man: Matching Target Strategies to the Need

Guest expert: Rob Howes | Senior Director Hit ID, Small Molecule Drug Discovery, Charles River

In the current funding environment, it has never been more important to pair the right hit identification strategy with your target. As funding activity increases, hit identification is gaining greater importance with the widespread need to rebuild early-stage pipelines, and to build compelling data packages to attract fresh capital.

In this episode, we talk to Rob Howes, Senior Director of Hit ID, Small Molecule Drug Discovery. Learn about how the landscape of hit identification is changing, how drug developers can think innovatively to increase investor confidence in their candidates, how to strategically leverage a broad portfolio of technologies, and how to get started with novel or undruggable targets.

Episode 5

Why Failure Can Be a Faster Path to Success

Guest expert: Sarah Gould | Director, Senior Principle Scientific Advisor, Charles River

How can capitalizing on earlier in vitro methods and innovative technology increase investor confidence and support clinical success in a challenging R&D environment? One of the reasons that drug development is so expensive and time consuming is the cost of clinical trial failures. A critical means of accelerating drug development and reducing its cost lies in identifying candidates with risks that outweigh their benefits as quickly as possible.

In this episode, we talk to Sarah Gould, Director and Senior Principle Scientific Advisor at Charles River, about how we can reposition the way we think, plan, and strategize around de-risking therapeutic candidates and drug discovery programs.

Episode 4

Driving Deeper Insights into Structure-Based Drug Design with Cryo-EM

Guest experts: Karl Bertram | Managing Director, ATEM Structural Discovery and Tim O’Bryan | Director of Discovery Partnerships and Commercial Integration, Charles River Discovery

Cryo-EM is rapidly becoming an essential component of a comprehensive structure-based drug design portfolio. Often a more ideal solution for large and challenging complexes and structures which are difficult to crystallize, cryo-EM works by flash freezing samples for analysis.

In this episode, we talk to Dr. Karl Bertram from Charles River partner ATEM Structural Discovery about how the integration of AI with Cryo-EM can empower structure-based drug design, and specifically how their proprietary software can be leveraged for advanced automated characterization of lipid nanoparticles. Joining Karl is Tim O’Bryan, who will discuss how Charles River works collaboratively with research partners to provide a heightened user experience for drug discovery clients.

Episode 3

Using Early Biomarker Discovery to Secure Clinical Success

Guest expert: Stefan Kostense | Director of Biology, Discovery

More and more drug developers are choosing to begin their biomarker research early in the discovery pipeline. Biomarkers can provide insights into experimental therapies, identify patients who are likely to benefit from them, and improve chances for clinical success. Charles River Laboratories offers a range of early biomarker discovery services, leveraging the expertise of its scientists to identify biomarkers in the early stages of drug development programs.

In this episode, we talk to Stefan Kostense, director of biology at Charles River Laboratories, about the benefits of conducting biomarker discovery early in the drug development process, how it can drive development decisions and success in the preclinical phase and beyond, and how it benefits patients.

Episode 2

Rethinking Mass Spectrometry for Drug Discovery

Guest expert: Zack Gurard-Levin, | Science Director, Discovery

The SAMDI platform provides an innovative approach to high-throughput mass spectrometry, successfully navigating the optical interference challenges associated with many conventional high-volume screening approaches. In this episode, Science Director Zack Gurard-Levin and Daniel Levine discuss how the technology works to accelerate drug discovery and how “losing the label” can open new avenues for researchers to rapidly execute hit identification campaigns.

Episode 1

De-Risking Therapeutic Candidates with Off-Target Screening

Guest expert: Mark Aspinall-O’Dea | Associate Director of Advanced Modalities, Discovery

The high cost of drug development is linked to the high rate of therapies that fail in the clinic. Safety concerns relating to the ability of an experimental therapy to bind to more than the target of interest is one common reason for failures in development.

The Retrogenix^® cell microarray is a unique innovative technology that enables researchers to detect off-target binding early in the drug development process. This identifies potential safety problems of an experimental therapy and generates data widely accepted by global regulators to support IND submissions and drive confidence in therapeutic candidates.

In this episode, Mark Aspinall-O’Dea, Associate Director Advanced Modalities in Discovery, talks to us about the risks of off-target binding and how this novel platform works to detect potential problems in a translatable in vitro setting across therapeutic modalities.

This podcast series was made in collaboration with Big4Bio and presented by Daniel Levine of Levine Media Group.