Current Trends in Drug Discovery - Young Scientists and Tomorrow's Medicines: Highlights from a joint Society for Medicines Research and British Pharmacological Society meeting

This well-attended 1-day meeting brought together presentations from both internationally recognized keynote speakers and early career scientists presenting their work either as oral or poster presentations. There are several early career symposia organized by the various professional bodies focused on their areas of interest. This meeting, however, specifically aimed to bring together early career scientists from all life science and drug discovery related disciplines and from academia and industry to share their work and experiences. A broad range of topics were covered during the day through posters and oral presentations and included medicinal chemistry, chemical biology, cheminformatics, biochemistry, safety assessment, application of artificial intelligence, assay development and aspects of regulatory approval. Prizes were awarded for the best presentation and best poster. The best presentation prize was awarded to Hannah Lithgow (Strathclyde University and GlaxoSmithKline [GSK]) for her talk "Investigating the impact of covalency on Protac-mediated degradation of BTK." The best poster prize was awarded to Cassie Messenger (GSK) for her poster "Molecular availability and accessibility - measuring and understanding cellular drug concentrations." All presenters of posters and oral papers also received free membership of the Society for Medicines Research (SMR) for a year. The meeting organizers gratefully acknowledge sponsorship by AstraZeneca and GlaxoSmithKline.