Doctoral Meeting: 'From Molecules to Medicines: Why Toxicity Matters in Drug Discovery'

Ever wondered why developing a new drug takes so long, and why so many promising candidates never make it to the pharmacy? Drug discovery is an expensive and highly uncertain journey, where most candidate molecules fail before ever reaching patients. One of the main reasons for this failure is toxicity: compounds that look promising at first can later turn out to be harmful. This is often detected too late, after years of development.

But what if we could detect whether a molecule is toxic before it is ever synthesized or tested in the lab? In this talk, I will give an accessible introduction to the drug discovery process, focusing on where toxicity assessment comes into play and why it is such an important challenge. I will discuss how computational approaches can help identify potential safety issues earlier on, and how this motivates my PhD research. The goal of this presentation is to provide a clear and intuitive overview of the problem, setting the stage for the work I am starting to develop.

• Supervisor: Manuel Lama Penín
• Moderator: Javier Fernández Lozano