Molecular Diagnostics and Drug Discovery Lab (MD3) at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) along with KAUST Smart Health Initiative (SHI) are pleased to announce the KAUST Research Conference 2022 on drug design titled "Modern trends in targeted structure-based drug design and discovery."

As a mankind, we have been in a constant struggle with various diseases and plagues since our early days. Over the centuries we have been discovering remedies for vast array of health problems, however during the last decades we can observe a decline of groundbreaking discoveries in pharmaceutical industry due to increasing complexities in finding a specific ligand for the target of interest. As our knowledge on genome, proteome and metabolome have increased and the technology improved, hundreds of new and potential drug targets have surfaced. However, finding a ligand that could bind to the target of interest have proven to be a major decelerator in progress. To overcome this, structure-based approach in drug design have been extensively used and have already proven its efficacy.

The meeting will address the recent trends in contemporary drug design and discovery from the perspective of experimental state-of-the-art integrated structural biology and artificial intelligence AI-augmented computational solutions. The attendees will have an opportunity to gain and exchange knowledge on tools, resources, approaches and ideas with the world-renowned scientists and researchers in the field.