Modern Biotech Medicine Development

Since the late 1990s, broad-spectrum chemotherapy has gradually been giving way to targeted therapies for cancer and other severe diseases — drugs that act on mechanisms unique to the pathological process and cause far less collateral damage to healthy tissue. Keys this precise often require something more sophisticated than small chemical molecules of a few dozen atoms. Fortunately, nature has already invented something better for us: proteins. Unfortunately, natural proteins don't cover every situation, and so for the past 30 years biotech companies around the world have rushed to build artificial protein molecules against every target of interest.

Pavel has been involved in the creation of most of the protein drugs developed in Russia, moving from bench scientist to Vice President for Research and Development. In his talk he will discuss which approaches to cancer therapy looked most promising ten years ago, why they often (to put it mildly) fail to work, and what hypotheses exist for fixing this; why an effective drug can be shelved before it reaches registration; and, most importantly, how advances in computing and machine learning have begun to reshape this process — and whether any products developed with these technologies already exist.