03-Apr-2023
The Fragment-Screen project commenced with a fantastic Kick-Off Meeting held in Frankfurt at the Forschungskolleg Humanwissenschaften, a two-day gathering of scientific talks and project discussions. Coordinated by Instruct-ERIC and chaired by Instruct Director Prof Harald Schwalbe, the event brought together participants from across the consortium, both in person and remotely.
The Fragment Screen Project aims to build on existing successes of fragment-based drug discovery (FBDD) by developing new and innovative methodologies in the field, across Cryo-EM, NMR, crystallisation techniques, artificial intelligence, and mass spectrometry. To celebrate this, representatives from each discipline were invited to give their insight into on their experiences using structural biology technologies for FBDD.
The meeting opened with the audience treated to a great talk from keynote speaker Steve Fesik of Vanderbilt University, who described how their work on FBDD with NMR led to drug development for cancer targets previously considered undruggable. It was an honour to receive such an accomplished scientist in the field to initiate the meeting, and the talk displayed the exciting and continued potential of FBDD.
The second speaker was Pamela Williams of Astex, who outlined the role of cryo-EM on FBDD, and how the expansion of the EM field has already made significant gains for drug discovery, and with a look into the future of the technique. Pamela was followed by Payel Das of IBM, whose talk gave a detailed overview of the role of AI in FBDD, particularly its recent history, but again with a view to how it can evolve in the coming years to garner significantly more data for FBDD – defining how AI can play such a key role in the Fragment-Screen project. Through iterative cycles of AI analysis of FBDD data, the response time for drug discovery can be drastically reduced, which will have huge benefits beyond the field of life sciences.
The final keynote speaker was Frank Von Delft of Diamond Light Source, who provided an overview of the COVID-19 Moonshot project, which utilised X-ray crystallography techniques to expand the global database of COVID-19 structures and fragments. In amongst the keynote speaker session was an introduction to the project from Andreas Holtel, who is the Project Officer for Fragment-Screen, and who gave an indication of its expectations and contextual aims.
Hearing from speakers in crystallography, cryo-EM, and NMR was important, to illustrate what the Fragment-Screen project wants to achieve; synergistically combining efforts and skills from different communities and technologies to achieve multi-disciplinary approaches to health and drug-discovery. These efforts will lead to new and innovative workflows, which can then be integrated into the access programmes of established research infrastructures, including Instruct-ERIC.
Harald Schwalbe then gave an overview of the project from a scientific standpoint, describing the inspiration for Fragment-Screen and the way in which it came to fruition, whilst also outlining the goals for the project and how the consortium hopes to achieve them.
The end of the first day and beginning of the second was filled with presentations from the Work Package (WP) leaders, who gave an overview of the tasks, deliverables, and milestones involved in their WP, with some leads presenting remotely from very far-flung corners of the world. These talks preceded breakout sessions, in which participants could discuss in more detail the upcoming and immediate tasks and plans for their WP.
Thank you to everyone who joined, participated and gave talks at the Kick-Off meeting. It was a very successful two days, and bodes well for a positive and prosperous project over the coming years.
