Despite significant advances in drug development tools, technologies and strategies in recent years, these advances have not translated into successful treatments for brain diseases. While obstacles like the blood-brain barrier do pose additional challenges in this field, more can, and needs to be done to drive progress towards thus far elusive therapeutic successes.

We desperately need new approaches to innovate the landscape of drug discovery in brain therapeutics, and interestingly, the COVID-19 pandemic has yielded some critical insights. In the last year, the COVID-19 pandemic has provided us a new window into how to think and work differently to smash old timelines for drug discovery.

Through this virtual event, we invite the global drug discovery community in brain therapeutics to come together to brainstorm about lessons learned from these pandemic times, and how to apply these new strategies to catalyze success in our own field. In particular, we will address new models for collaboration and integration of multi-stakeholder partnerships to re-envision a more efficient and effective ecosystem of drug discovery for CNS therapeutics.

Key Topics:

• How to incentivize inclusive, efficient, collaborations among all actors, including academia, government institutions, for-profit companies and funders, both public (governments) and private (charities).
• How to scout the ecosystem for transformational innovation that can deliver targets linked to disease biology and associated biomarkers to improve the success rate of CNS therapeutics?
• How to take advantage of breakthrough technologies and approaches that have revolutionized therapies in non-CNS diseases?
• How to ensure that existing investments open-science platforms are leveraged effectively by academia and private sectors?
• How do we create new road-maps “driving science” through go/no go decisions on key targets for more efficient processes?
• How can we define relevant companion biomarkers/diagnostic stratification, for a clinically relevant drug discovery process?

This ePanel event continues the conversations initiated during a roundtable discussion at the Keystone Symposia on Brain Therapeutics: Disruptive Technologies and Opportunities, on February 16-19, 2020 in Santa Fe. We have invited the panelists to reconvene now in light of the new landscape shaped by COVID-19.