AI At The Frontier: Empowering Early Career Professionals In Drug Discovery
Webinar – are you curious about the cutting-edge intersection of artificial intelligence and drug discovery?
Join us for an insightful webinar where industry experts will delve into the transformative role of AI in revolutionising drug discovery and how it will impact your career in drug discovery.
Key Highlights
- Expert panel Discussion: Engage with our panel of experts as they share their career stories and perspectives on the future of AI in drug discovery.
- Interactive Q&A session: Pose your questions directly to the experts and get tailored insights to your interests and concerns.
Our Confirmed Panellist Speakers are:
- Harini Srinivasan
- Miguel Gancedo Rodrigo
- Miles Pemberton
- Janne Bate
Who is this targeted at?
Undergraduate, Postgraduate, Post-Doctoral and other early career professionals in science looking to learn more about the use of AI in Drug Discovery.
Watch the video below to hear their insights:
About our speakers
Harini Srinivasan
Principal Scientific Associate, Serna Bio
Miguel Gancedo Rodrigo
Research Investigator, Isomorphic Labs
My name is Miguel, and I’m from Murcia, Spain. I pursued a degree in Pharmacy from the University of Murcia to become a qualified Pharmacist, followed by an MSc in Cancer Pharmacology at London Metropolitan University. During my studies, I had the exciting opportunity to work at The Francis Crick Institute’s Enchev Lab, exploring RecA recombinase kinetics through innovative techniques like time-resolved Cryo-EM and single molecule fluorescence.
Driven by an interest in structural biochemistry and drug discovery (DD), I joined AstraZeneca in 2019. Rising from Research Scientist to Senior Scientist, I supported early-stage DD efforts within their Protein Science group, based in Cambridge, UK. My role involved generating and characterizing complex proteins critical for biological assay development, hit discovery, and structural biology. During this time, I had the opportunity to step in as an interim Discovery Sciences project lead, sparking my interest in project leadership.
Fascinated by the potential of AI in medical research, I transitioned to BenevolentAI in early 2023 as a Biology Project Leader. There, I supported AI-enabled DD efforts in their small molecule portfolio. This involved designing and implementing biological strategies, encompassing target validation, hit identification, establishing assays, and collaborating on structural work.
Joining Isomorphic Labs in October 2024, I’m thrilled to be part of their mission to revolutionize DD through AI/ML. Inspired by AlphaFold’s achievements, Isomorphic Labs aims to reimagine the entire process, ultimately benefiting patients worldwide. As a Research Investigator, I lead the biology domain of Iso’s DD programs. Here, I collaborate closely with diverse scientific disciplines and the tech team to unlock the power of cutting-edge advancements, driving a unified and efficient approach to DD.
Miles Pemberton
University of Bath
Miles graduated from the University of Nottingham with an MSci degree in Chemistry in 2021, after completing his final year project with Dr. Andrew Teale using computational methods to explore the structure of molecules under strong magnetic fields.
After graduating, Miles went on to work as a scientist on AstraZeneca’s Research and Development graduate programme, working on projects in biocatalysis, computational organic chemistry and machine learning for drug discovery.
Miles is now completing his MRes year as part of the Accountable, Responsible and Transparent AI Integrated PhD programme at the University of Bath, where he will go on to complete his PhD under the supervision of Dr. Matthew Grayson.
His current research concerns the use of quantum chemistry and machine learning to understand chemical reactivity, with the aim of providing insights into the most widely used reaction classes in pharmaceutical synthesis and enabling chemists to design and optimise new synthetic routes to molecules.
Co-Chair: Jasmine Trigg
Bio Analytic Applications Scientist, Sartorius
Jasmine is currently a member of the ELRIG’s Early Careers Professionals (ECP) workgroup, which aims to enhance ECP engagement in the ELRIG network via targeted events, opportunities, and knowledge.
In her day job, she is a Scientist at Sartorius within the Bio Analytic Applications team. She is involved in the research and development of cellular assays across multiple research areas for live-cell analysis applications, including AI-based image analysis tools.
Jasmine has a background in neuroscience and genetic manipulation, with early works focused on using a combined structural and molecular biology approach to assess disease-associated proteins implicated in Alzheimer’s disease.
Co-Chair: Millie Fox
Senior Drug Discovery Scientist, AstraZeneca
Millie graduated from the University of Sussex with a Biochemistry degree in 2016, which included an industrial placement year at GSK, Stevenage. Inspired by her time at GSK, Millie pursued a PhD at the University of Cambridge investigating the signalling pathways that drive cancer cell growth using in-vitro cell based assays and biochemical analysis.
Driven by an interest in drug discovery Millie joined AstraZeneca after completion of her PhD at the end of 2020. She is currently a Senior drug discovery scientist working across Cell Engineering, Cell Biology and Functional Genomics teams, using CRISPR/Cas9 and Next Generation Sequencing for target identification, target validation and drug development in the oncology disease area.
As an early career professional (ECP) herself, Millie is currently a member of ELRIG’s ECP workgroup, and is excited to co-chair her first webinar.
Q&A: Your questions and answers from our panelists during the live session
What do you “predict“ to be the most in demand technical skills for bioinformatics roles based on current trends? Do you think the current talent pool supply meets the demand?
The most in-demand technical skills for bioinformatics roles in drug discovery include proficiency in programming languages like R and Python which are important for handling data and running analyses.. You’ll also need to understand machine learning, which is a big part of using artificial intelligence in drug discovery. Bioinformatics is all about bringing together different areas of knowledge. Having a combination of computational skills & scientific knowledge such as molecular biology, genomics is also important. The ability to integrate these domains, including chemistry, is key for success in this field.
However, there is a significant skills gap in this area due to the fast-paced and evolving nature of the discipline. The demand for individuals with expertise in both computational and scientific domains is high, but the talent pool doesn’t currently meet this demand.
What is the future look like for Data scientists/ AI/ML professionals now that we have chatGPT and other tools like autoML which aims to replace the work of data scientists/AI professionals?
I’m still very optimistic about the field and the way we can integrate these GenAI tools to help us with our work. From an academic perspective, I don’t believe that AI will be able to replace the work we do; tools like ChatGPT and AutoML can be useful to help us code, but given most of my work involves developing new AI models to explore completely unsolved problems, ChatGPT’s use is still very limited in this space.
How did you make the transition from working to a big pharma company to a spin out of Google? Where do you enjoy more to work? big pharma or startups/spin off? What pro/cons?
Big pharma experienced is very well respected within biotech or small-startups. You get surprised at the level of this, particularly as you might be biased to not really knowing how valuable your the experience you’ve developed is. The AI space is very hot atm in terms of small-companies and joining one who’s mission you believe in will massively help you enter this space. This was my experience for joining BenevolentAI from AstraZeneca
What are your thoughts on the value of PhD in the industry / the possibility of a good career progression without one?
This was a question I asked myself a lot when deciding whether to leave industry and start my PhD. For me, I decided that I wanted to make the most of the training that was provided during a PhD to help me become a better AI scientist (especially given my background was in chemistry and my programming/AI knowledge was fairly limited). Having said this, I learnt a lot from my time in industry and there would’ve been a lot of opportunities for career progression, especially if you’re working in an area you’re already familiar with.
Dr. Harini Srinivasan is a Principal Scientific Associate at Serna Bio with over 10 years of research experience in academic institutions, health care organizations and pharmaceutical companies. With a background in Bioinformatics and Computational Biology, she has a keen interest in using technology to solve problems in healthcare and medicine.
Harini joined Serna Bio in early 2021 and has been an integral part of the multidisciplinary teamworking on target ID platform development to drug discovery. She has played a key role inbuilding the target identification platform and a proprietary database of transcriptome-wide, functional RNA structures. She leads the development of robust computational pipelines for analyzing the functional datasets that play a crucial role in identifying key target-compound pairs for progression towards drug discovery.
Over the course of her career, Dr. Srinivasan has led the development of multiple computational pipelines to process data from different next generation sequencing techniques with applications in oncology, genome editing systems including CRISPR-Cas mediated DNA editing, and ADAR-mediated RNA editing. She also has experience looking at the biomolecular systems at an atomistic level to model them, understand their functioning and identify potential ways to modulate them. Dr Srinivasan is passionate about continuous learning as is evidenced by her dynamic career, which has resulted in expertise ranging from studying biomolecular systems at an atomistic level to working with big data from high-throughput single-cell technologies. In her current role at Serna Bio, she utilizes her rich experiences from both these domains and is taking another step towards her goal of using her skills to impact patient care.