A pharm-fest in Beantown

For four days in August, the streets of Boston were alive with some of the most important movers and shakers in the drug world. Men and women in suits huddled in corners to discuss the new era of cooperation between corporate families that previously fought for market share. The word is out. No one group can go it alone in the new economy. It’s time to come together and join forces against the common enemy: the bottom line.

That was the theme as International Business Communications played host to the annual Drug Discovery Technology (DDT) conference, which opened with a one-day summit on partnering and deal-making. Millennium Pharmaceuticals’ Steven Holtzman, the keynote speaker, highlighted the fact that biotechnology, more than any other industry, has relied on creative partnering to succeed. Other presenters from across the biopharma community followed suit, giving their own spin on the perils and perquisites of partnering.

Meanwhile, the technical sessions were opening at the other end of the conference center with talks on informatics, protein structure determination, and mass spectrometry. Tim Harris of Structural Genomix gave a short presentation on how high-throughput structure determination is changing the face of drug development. And Michael Collins of CEM reported on advances in the use of microwave energy in combinatorial chemistry.

Tuesday was the official opening of the main conference and saw the presentation of keynote addresses by Millennium’s Mark Levin and Pfizer’s George Milne. Levin spoke to the current mantra of pharmaceutical development, personalized medicine, discussing how advances in research and communication are leading to a medical revolution. Milne, meanwhile, addressed the question of why the potential of the postgenomic era has yet to be tapped. The technical sessions that followed addressed the issues of lead identification and optimization, using informatics and high throughput to cull the herd of false leads faster and more accurately.

Wednesday woke to the voice of the Whitehead Institute’s Eric Lander as he echoed the earlier statements of George Milne, leading the charge of the genomic revolution. This was followed by the presentation of the Aventis Innovative Investigator Award to John Hefti of Signature Bioscience for his work in multipole coupling spectroscopy, which relies on microwave and radio-frequency electromagnetic radiation. These talks were then backed up by a flurry of presentations highlighting commercial and research advances in proteomics, medicinal chemistry, screening, and microarrays. But perhaps the most interesting session of the afternoon revolved aroundthe development of a sound infrastructure to support drug discovery.

As is typical for DDT, the final day of the program saw the analysis of pharmaceutical case studies, in which researchers dropped their guard and let us in on the elation and heartaches of recent chemotherapeutic developments.