Drug discovery chemists are often plagued by two common issues: what is the most efficient way to test their hypotheses, and how can they iterate on those ideas quickly? A shift from design strategies based on trial and error towards a ‘predict-first’ approach to drug discovery allows teams to drastically expand the pool of molecules that can be explored, resulting in a highly interactive, fully in silico design-make-test-analyze (DMTA) cycle. 

Schrödinger looked to ACS Media Group to develop a strategy on how they could effectively showcase the digital chemistry strategy used by their clinical-stage drug candidates and demonstrate how this strategy — based on LiveDesign, Schrödinger’s cloud-native, collaborative enterprise informatics platform — empowers teams to design, computationally assess, and prioritize new compounds together in real-time.

ACS Media Group was tasked with solving these questions:

• How can we enhance our communication strategy to successfully disperse Schrödinger’s digital chemical strategy for drug discovery?
• What marketing tactics can we implement to expand our reach to key players in the pharmaceutical field seeking scientific advancement?
• What strategies can we utilize to generate a constant stream of high-quality leads and how can we nurture those leads into qualified prospects?

Wade Miller, Olivia Lynes, Eugene Hickey, and Alice Hooper — Senior Research Leaders and Senior Scientists from Schrödinger’s Therapeutics Group — demonstrated how teams can confidently spend time and energy exploring new, unknown, and often more complex designs while sending only the top-performing molecules for synthesis. The speakers illustrated how a predict-first strategy can accelerate and improve the drug discovery process, how centralized technology used by Schrödinger scientists enhances crowdsourced ideation and team collaboration, and how to overcome collaboration hurdles to increase project efficiency.