Pharma, Pharmaceutics and Biotechnology Conference

Drug discovery and development are the critical steps in the pipeline of converting scientific discovery into practical medicines in health care. This session is going to discuss the two processes in detail, highlighting methodologies, challenges, and progress toward new treatments with special interest in infectious diseases.

The drug discovery process gets initiated with the identification and validation of the biological targets involved in the etiology of diseases. Genomics, proteomics, and systems biology are used for the de novo understanding of the mechanisms of diseases. The rapid assessment of thousands of compounds is possible with high throughput screening techniques to determine that the lead compounds can effectively modulate these targets.

This determined lead compound is then optimized to produce a more potent, selective, and safer compound. Once the exploratory phase goes well, a candidate advances into the development of drugs, which considers preclinical and clinical studies. In preclinical research, there is a lot of laboratory and animal testing done to determine pharmacokinetics and pharmacodynamics, or how the drug is absorbed, metabolized, and excreted, as well as the way it would affect the body.

It is an important stage in determining dosing regimens appropriately and identifying potential toxicities before progressing to human trials. It includes a number of phases, which conclude whether the drug is safe and effective in humans. Phase I focuses on the safety of the drug, while it explores the effect that the drug has on a limited number of healthy volunteers. Phase II experiments the same drug to a higher number of patients than Phase I to establish efficacy and side effects.

Phase III is confirmation of how potent the drug will be in a more significant population of the patients, hence the basis for approval by the regulatory bodies. Indeed, today the regulatory landscape is inextricable from drug discovery and development. In fact, for that matter, agencies such as the FDA of the USA and EMA demand high advanced data on both safety and efficacy before drugs are sanctioned for release into the market.

This process calls for the various stages of new drugs to raise high standards to assure public health through them. Modern technologies such as artificial intelligence and machine learning, along with the biomarker-driven approaches, are transforming drug discovery by discovering candidates more efficiently and smoothing the development processes.

This session will concentrate on what has been achieved so far, what is still missing to tackle the challenges in developing drugs for infectious diseases-from a rapidly evolving response to emerging threats to the impact of antimicrobial resistance.

This workshop will give viewers an all-around view of how collaborative drug discovery and development efforts occur, including regulatory considerations and innovative strategies that will shape the future of therapeutic creation.