As someone who has been in the Drug Discovery Digital data business for over 20 year, the ELRIG Drug Discovery 2024 conference in London last week was an event well worth attending. With > 3000 registered attendees, an incredible number of vendor booths, >260 posters, a wide variety of profiles were in attendance: from students to senior executives of large companies, from researchers to instruments and technology providers. The vast hall of the venue (ExCeL London) was an unique place enabling networking and exchange. Its location, with convenient central public transport, and its facilities were additional contributing factors to the success.

With no less than 7 auditorium/presentation zones with parallel tracks, choosing what talk to attend was difficult. The hot subjects of the moment, AI and ML, was well represented.

The scientific talks and posters presented lots of promising new advances in many areas. New modalities such peptides, PROTAC, and others, are clearly raising, offering more and more prospects and hope for exciting future therapeutics for the patients.

Several main instrument vendors were presenting their latest tech for R&D: many robots, assay pates, liquid handlers, reactors etc. . Smaller emerging companies, were also presenting their innovations such as chip/lab in a cell or super sensitive analytical chips. The possibilities presented by all these innovations are very promising. I look forward to seeing research advancement using these new techs in the near future.

I particularly enjoyed the sessions in the Breakthrough Zone theatre on Day #2 on the subject of start-ups and spin-out companies. Lots of networking, resources and great ideas were exchanged. I look forward to discuss with some of the contact I made during this session.

The Tech Theatre Zone hosted a session very forward and future looking in my opinion: sustainability. Burkhard Schaefer from Splashlake chaired a session on “Data in the lab”, talking about the challenges for reusability of the data. The last panel discussion continued the discussion on this subject before the close of the conference. I look forward to carrying on this discussion.

This last subject is one I particularly support. Please don’t hesitate to contact us to discuss your challenges, views and how I can provide support to your organisation.