Agnieszka Kielczewska, Senior Scientist, Antibody Discovery, Amgen, Canada
Kielczewska describes her team’s novel affinity maturation approach to help “close” an affinity gap without compromising binding affinity to the human target.

Jonny Finlay, PhD, CSO, Ultrahuman, United Kingdom
Finlay discusses the role of polyspecificity in the toxicity and side effects of checkpoint inhibitors, the solvability of the problem, and where bottlenecks occur during the development stage of biotherapeutic R&D

Catherine Hutchings, PhD, Independent Consultant, United Kingdom
Hutchings describes her work tracking the progress in developing biotherapeutics against GPCR and ion channel targets, the successes and failures of targeting membrane proteins, and what technologies in the R&D space have the potential to be game changers.

Kendra K. Bence, PhD, Senior Director, Metabolism, Internal Medicine Research Unit (IMRU), Pfizer, Inc.
Dr. Bence explains why and how Pfizer scientists developed an inhibitor against ketohexokinase as a drug candidate for non-alcoholic steatohepatitis (NASH), a form of liver fibrosis.

GPCRs, which play a role in most biological processes, remain one of the most vibrant fields for drug discovery. Years of data are increasingly being leveraged to overcome the complexity of GPCR biology and pharmacology and accelerate GPCR drug discovery. It is now possible to hope to rationally design drugs with optimal effects, thanks to a better understanding of the concept of functional selectivity.