Advancing Drug Discovery: From Better Hits to Better Candidates September 17-21, 2006

Advancing Drug Discovery: From Better Hits to Better Candidates September 17-21, 2006
Seattle, Washington
he theme of the SBS 2006 annual conference in Seattle highlights the impact of screening and technology applications on drug discovery. With over a decade of HTS and combinatorial chemistry strategies now behind us, it is important to understand and critique the impact these technologies have had on providing better hits, better leads and most of all, better drug candidates to ultimately improve the quality of patient care.
In the selection of sessions, we have preserved the core topics of SBS while introducing new topics that reflect the spirit of the recent name change. The core topics will highlight the latest developments in technologies directed towards target biology and screening, imaging and high content assays. We have also maintained continuity of newer topics from recent meetings such as the application of ADMET in the early phases of drug discovery, biomarkers for preclinical and clinical evaluation of new drugs and cell and protein production. The new topics will focus on the theme of developing better lead candidates with sessions on creating new chemical space for lead generation, structural biology, data mining and docking competition and high throughput chemistry.
We have included provocative topics of continued interest such as systems biology, target specificity and compound selectivity and challenges of bridging the gap between activity at heterologous targets and native cells. Finally, we have added a session to discuss a very timely topic addressing drug discovery for diseases of the developing world.
To complement podium talks, interactive discussion sessions will continue to develop the primary themes of the conference.
On behalf of the conference committee and the session chairs, we invite you to join us in Seattle and share some of the exciting presentations and discussions that we are confident will make the 2006 meeting a huge success!