Speakers

Dr. Anke Mueller-Fahrnow is the Chair of Conscience's Board of Directors, the Chair of the SGC (Structural Genomics Consortium) Board of Directors, and works as an independent consultant for a German contract research organization, Nuvisan ICB GmbH. Trained as a biochemist and structural biologist at the Free University of Berlin, Anke has 30 years of experience in pharmaceutical drug discovery. She began her career as a bench scientist and transitioned to managerial positions with increasing levels of responsibility. She retired from Bayer as Vice President, Lead Discovery Berlin.

Dr. Gustavo Stolovitzky is the Founding Director of the Biomedical Data Science Hub (Bio-DaSH) at NYU Langone Health, and Professor in the Department of Pathology at NYU Grossman School of Medicine. He is the Founding Chair of the DREAM Challenges, a crowdsourcing effort that uses collaborative science to solve translational medicine problems through data analysis. Previously, Gustavo was the Chief Scientific Officer at GeneDx and an IBM Fellow at IBM Research. Gustavo has pioneered the use of crowdsourcing as a tool for scientific research in systems biology and of the Wisdom of Crowds as a robust methodology for predictive modeling. His current main interests are in the fields of computational systems biology, crowdsourcing, ensemble learning, and data science and their application to translational research.

Cas Wognum is a Senior Scientist at Valence Labs. Within Valence he is nowadays leading the Polaris project. He holds a MSc. degree in Artificial Intelligence and Computer Graphics from the University of Utrecht.

Valence Labs is a research engine, powered by Recursion, committed to advancing the frontier of AI in drug discovery.

Richard Gold, LLM, SJD, is a professor at McGill University specializing in finding novel incentives to advance drug discovery more efficiently, Director of McGill’s Center for Intellectual Property Policy, and Senior Fellow at the Centre for International Governance Innovation. His work spans over two decades in universities, before courts, and with international organizations on issues ranging from patents on human genes, public-private partnerships to advance biomedical innovation, pharmaceutical patents, and international trade. Richard contributes to both academic audiences - in science and research policy, intellectual property, business, international relations and more - and the public through opinion pieces and media interviews. He has advised governments and international organizations, such as the World Intellectual Property Organization, the World Health Organization, the Organisation for Economic Development and Co-operation, and UNITAID, as well as having been a member of expert groups on issues ranging from biomedical innovation to nanotechnology. Richard combines academic rigor with implementation, mixing his backgrounds in science, law, and legal practice to make science a team sport.

After finishing his postgraduate degrees in biochemistry at Leiden University in the Netherlands, Jenke continued on to do a PhD in physical chemistry focussing on alchemical free energy calculations and machine learning in the group of Julien Michel at the University of Edinburgh in the United Kingdom. Currently, Jenke works as a senior scientist for the ASAP Discovery Consortium as the computational core lead, acting as science liaison between all scientific groups within the consortium and as the coordinator of computational support to ongoing drug discovery programs

Matthieu Schapira, PhD is a Professor in the Department of Pharmacology and Toxicology, UofT, and is the head of computational chemistry, protein bioinformatics, and data management at the SGC-Toronto. He leads the CACHE initiative for benchmarking computational ‘hit finding’. Dr. Schapira is a recognized authority in the structural chemistry of drug target classes such as chromatin regulators, ubiquitylation pathways and WDR proteins, and has created popular online informatics resources for these targets such as Chromohub, Ubihub and ChemBioPort. He is interested in novel strategies to expand and ML tools to exploit the accessible chemistry space. His trainees have gone on to become important innovators in AI-driven drug discovery at Toronto-born biotechs such as Atomwise and Cyclica.

Dr. Antolin is a Group Leader at IDIBELL-ICO. He is an Organic Chemist by training (Ramon Llull University, Spain). After working two years in the pharmaceutical industry as an in silico drug design scientist, he moved back to Academia to obtain a PhD in Pharmacoinformatics (Pompeu Fabra University, Spain). After seven years as PostDoctoral Fellow at the Institute of Cancer Research (UK) and Columbia University (USA), he returned to Spain in 2023 to start his own Laboratory supported first by a La Caixa Junior Leader Fellowship and now by a Miguel Servet Fellowship. His lab is interested in developing open science chemical biology resources, harnessing the effects of drugs at a systems level in precision medicine, and discovering new cancer drugs leveraging Big Data and AI. Since 2024, he Chairs MAINFRAME, an international, Open Science network of machine learning scientists and computational chemists dedicated to advancing pre-competitive drug discovery research and promoting open-source AI method development.

Dr. Karmen Čondić-Jurkić is the co-founder and Executive Director of the Open Molecular Software Foundation. She holds a PhD in computational chemistry and her research was focused on studying protein function and dynamics using multiscale modeling techniques. During her postdoc years, she developed a passion for open science and research infrastructure. She is particularly interested in building new resources and making research infrastructure more robust, sustainable and accessible, and facilitating large-scale collaboration projects.

Anne Fortier is Conscience's Vice President of Drug Discovery and Development. She is a drug hunter, a strong problem-solving person and an accomplished project leader with a track record of successfully delivering first-in-class small molecule agents, including Inaxaplin.

She holds a PhD in Biochemistry from McGill University's Centre for the Study of Host Resistance and is an expert in scientific area spanning from immunological and infectious diseases to rare genetic, gastrointestinal and renal diseases. Prior to joining Conscience, she has been a postdoctoral fellow at Trudeau Institute, she has fulfilled key leadership and strategic roles over 10+ years in the pharmaceutical industry at Vertex and has been an independent consultant supporting and mentoring biotech startups.

Anne will introduce this session and lead the questions and discussion.

Max Morgan is the CEO of M4K Pharma’s parent, Agora Open Science Trust, and leads implementation of M4K’s business and intellectual property strategy. Max is also the General Counsel of the Structural Genomics Consortium, where he leads legal, operational, and governance matters. Prior to joining SGC, Max worked as an intellectual property litigator and pharmaceutical regulatory lawyer, and more recently served as in-house counsel with Grand Challenges Canada. Max holds a B.Sc. from McGill University, a J.D. from the University of Toronto, and an LL.M. from Harvard Law School. He is a member of the Law Society of Ontario and the New York State Bar.

Ed J. Griffen earned his Ph.D. in synthetic organic chemistry from Imperial College, London, followed by postdoctoral research at the University of Waterloo, Canada. He joined Zeneca Pharmaceuticals as a medicinal chemistry team leader, focusing on CNS, infection, oncology, and chemical biology. During a secondment in computational chemistry, he co-developed matched molecular pair tools to enhance medicinal chemistry strategies. In 2012, he co-founded MedChemica Ltd. He is an inventor on 17 patents, authored over 30 articles and a textbook. He has contributed to four projects advancing to clinical development. In March 2020, he joined the Open Science COVID Moonshot team as Design Team Leader to discover antiviral treatments for SARS-CoV-2 leading to multiple compounds entering pre-clinical development funded by the Wellcome Trust. In 2022, he became head of Lead Optimisation at the NIH-funded ASAP Pandemic Preparedness U19 AViDD Centre, focusing on delivering antivirals for pandemic-prone diseases globally, equitably, and affordably.

Oren Kraus is an Associate Director of Machine Learning at Recursion Pharma, where his team develops foundation models for cell imaging and gene expression data. Before joining Recursion, Oren founded Phenomic AI, a startup leveraging computer vision and phenotypic screening to develop cancer therapeutics. During his PhD at the University of Toronto, Oren developed deep learning models for cell-microscopy data and interned at Apple and Borealis AI. He’s passionate about building machine learning models to decode biology.

Dr. Benjamin Haibe-Kains is a Senior Scientist at the Princess Margaret Cancer Centre (PM), University Health Network, and Professor in the Medical Biophysics Department of the University of Toronto. Dr. Haibe-Kains earned his PhD in Bioinformatics at the Université Libre de Bruxelles (Belgium). Supported by a Fulbright Award, he did his postdoctoral fellowship at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Harvard School of Public Health (USA). He is now the Canada Research Chair in Computational Pharmacogenomics and the Scientific Director of the Cancer Digital Intelligence Program at PM. Dr. Haibe-Kains’ research focuses on the integration of high-throughput data from various sources to simultaneously analyze multiple facets of cancer progression and therapy response using machine learning and artificial intelligence methods. Dr. Haibe-Kains’ team analyzes large-scale radiological and (pharmaco)genomic datasets to develop new prognostic and predictive models to improve cancer care

Karina obtained her undergraduate degree in Computer Engineering from FURG and a Master's and Doctorate in Computer Science from PUCRS, Brazil. Since 2007, she have been dedicated to advancing the fields of Bioinformatics - genomics, virtual screening, molecular docking and molécular dynamics simulations - and Data Science.

Dr Daniel Cole is a UKRI Future Leaders Fellow and Reader in Computational Chemistry at Newcastle University. He has worked previously as a Marie Curie Research Fellow in the group of Prof William Jorgensen at Yale University, and as a Research Associate in the group of Prof Mike Payne at the University of Cambridge. He is a co-investigator at the Open Force Field Initiative and sits on the management groups of the CCP-BioSim and ExaBioSim collaborative computational projects. He is committed to an open science approach to enabling computer-aided drug design, and is a developer of several open source software packages, including QUBEKit, OpenFF-BespokeFit and FEgrow.

Dr. Gentile is an assistant professor in the Department of Chemistry and Biomolecular Sciences at the University of Ottawa and a Principal Investigator at the Ottawa Institute of Systems Biology. He holds a MSc in Bioengineering from the Politecnico di Torino, a PhD in Biophysics from the University of Alberta and was a CIHR/MSFHR- postdoctoral fellows at The University of British Columbia before joining the University of Ottawa in 2022. His current research focuses on the combination of computational chemistry and AI methods for the discovery of small molecules and biotherapeutics.

Mykola Protopopov is the Head of Computational Chemistry at Chemspace. He holds a PhD in Molecular Biology, with his research focused on developing novel protein kinase inhibitors. Since 2014, Mykola has been involved in numerous projects dedicated to the development of chemical probes targeting a range of molecular targets, including protein kinases, GPCRs, oxidoreductases, and bacterial pathogens.

Linda Lafontaine is a Patient Advocate for Hereditary Spastic Paraplegia (HSP). Linda is an HSP patient and an active member of the HSP community. She has worked with multiple foundations, taken the stage as a speaker at events, and rallied the HSP community to participate in research.

Dr. Jason Karamchandani is an Associate Professor in the Department of Pathology at McGill University, a neuropathologist, and Director of C-BIG, The Neuro's open science repository. Jason has overseen the founding and growth of C-BIG, including the number of patient cohorts it serves and the number of researchers and projects that rely on it as an invaluable open science resource.