At the 2024 ACS National Meeting in Denver, the Division of Toxicology (TOXI) and the Division of Chemical Information (CINF) will hold a unique joint symposium and career panel, on the topic “Elevating the Development of Safer Drugs Through Artificial Intelligence” on Sunday, August 18th beginning at 2 PM in Bluebird Ballroom 2G Colorado Convention Center. This topic is a critical crossover application of cutting-edge computational approaches and data science to tackle challenges in predicting toxicological risks that continue to confound more traditional experimental approaches in time, resource use, and translatability. Momentum in this area reflects growing successes in predictive model performances and shifts in policies such as decreasing reliance on animal testing that favor computational methods.
The symposium was co-organized by Drs. Rachelle Bienstock (CINF), a visiting researcher at NIH, and Grover P Miller (TOXI) at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences. The event will consist of presentations from researchers at NCATS (National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences/NIH) on machine learning and structure-based virtual screening; researchers from the Shanghai Institute on cocrystal predictions using graph convolution networks; University of New Mexico researchers on bioassay analysis, cheminformatics machine learning tools, and workflows; FDA researchers on crowdsourcing and benchmarking predictive toxicology; and Duke University researchers on predicting ADMET properties of medications with machine learning.
The career panel will directly follow the symposium session. The focus of the career panel will be the development and application of computational machine learning techniques in the toxicology space, the potential career opportunities for students and early career chemists and computational scientists, and the background needed to assume positions in this new burgeoning field.
Featured Career Panel Speakers:
- Dr. Sean Ekins, Founder and CEO of Collaborations Pharmaceuticals, Inc.
- Dr. Bob Clark, Emeritus Fellow Simulations Plus, Inc. and Adjunct Professor of Informatics Indiana University
- Dr. Frederik van den Broek, Senior Director, Professional Services and Consulting, Elsevier
- Dr. Rachelle Bienstock, Visiting Guest Researcher, NIH (formerly Cresset Software and Discovery and Revvity/PerkinElmer Informatics)
Each career panel speaker will give a brief presentation regarding the company which they work for, the work that is performed in the computational/machine learning predictive toxicology space, their experiences, and career opportunities. After each panelist gives their brief presentation, there will be significant time to address questions from the audience and for informal conversations/discussions. Dr. Grover P Miller will moderate the event.
We hope you will attend as this will be an invaluable opportunity to learn about career opportunities and the future of computational and machine learning applications in the predictive toxicology space. Investment in this initiative for fostering a cross-divisional community with shared interests in modeling, toxicity, and drug development was made possible by an ACS Convergent Chemistry Communities Grant awarded to TOXI on Converging Augmented Artificial Intelligence (AAI) Chemistries.