Preclinical, Clinical and Translational Sciences
Laura Schaevitz, PhD (she/her/hers)
Senior Vice President and Head of Research
Recursion Pharmaceuticals
Salt Lake City, Utah
Jennifer Vance, PhD (she/her/hers)
Director, Bioanalytical and Biomarker Development
Recursion Pharmaceuticals
Salt Lake City, Utah
The use of artificial intelligence (AI) and other sophisticated technologies in drug discovery and development represents the potential for a transformative leap forward in how we predict drug success and safety and toxicity. The key to successfully applying these technologies in drug discovery is to build iterative cycles of experimentation (wet-lab assays) and machine learning (dry-lab predictions) in a tightly connected loop. These approaches can be scaled to efficiently map and navigate biology and chemistry, leading to an industrialized drug discovery pipeline.
Laura Schaevitz, Ph.D, is SVP and Head of Research at Recursion, a leading Salt Lake City-based clinical-stage TechBio company building and applying the latest technology tools to evolve the way we discover and develop medicines. Dr. Schaevitz will discuss how AI and ML converge with biology, chemistry, automation, data science, and engineering to modernize drug discovery and development. She will share compelling case studies for how these tools are being integrated across drug discovery to accelerate timelines throughout Recursion’s drug discovery efforts to bring new treatments to patients faster. This includes the discovery of the novel oncology target RBM39 and the subsequent optimization efforts that have led to a new development candidate for the potential treatment of certain types of cancer.