The Mangul lab presented at 2nd Drug Discovery Workshop at USC
Mina Jung March 19, 2024
The Mangul lab presented at 2nd Drug Discovery Workshop at USC
Mina Jung, Sanskruti Sharma, Justin Su, and Mohammad Vahed attended the 2nd Drug Discovery Innovation Workshop, hosted by CNT3D (Center for New Technologies in Drug Discovery and Development), MESH Academy, and Bridge Institute. The event, held on February 23 at the Michelson Center For Convergent Bioscience at USC, was composed of keynote speakers who shared novel research in drug discovery and development in industry and academia, as well as a poster session.
The CNT3D aims to bridge synthetic and medicinal chemistry, structural biology, and machine learning/AI in breakthrough technologies for drug discovery and development. The Drug Discovery Workshop therefore started with a speaker session featuring talks on new technologies in drug development developed at USC Dornsife. Exciting research on systems biology modeling to predict drug effects, novel chemical tools for making pharmaceuticals, and identifying drug targets was discussed and shared.
Following the first speaker session was the poster session, in which each of the Mangul Lab members had the opportunity to present. Mina presented the poster titled “A rigorous benchmarking of alignment-based HLA typing algorithms for RNA-seq data.” Other contributors to the study included Dottie Yu, Ram Ayyala, and Dr. Serghei Mangul.
Sanskruti presented the poster titled “RNA-seq data science: landscape for modern RNA-seq tools,” with Karishma Chhugani and Dhrithi Deshpande contributing to the poster.
Justin presented the poster titled “A rigorous benchmarking of methods for SARS-CoV-2 lineage abundance estimation in wastewater.” Other contributors to the study included Viorel Munteanu, Victor Gordeev, and Dr. Mangul.
Finally, last but not least, Mohammad presented the poster titled “A comprehensive analysis of the reusability of public omics data across 4 million research publications.”
The event concluded with another speaker session focused on programs and initiatives in drug discovery and development at USC. It was fascinating to learn about the realities, struggles, and breakthroughs that occur in the process of translating drug discoveries in academia to pharmaceutical applications in industry.
Overall, the 2nd Drug Discovery Workshop was a lively affair of people going in and out of the speaker events (held in the open hall of the Michelson Center), audience members asking questions that connected to topics a previous speaker discussed, and presenters from a wide range of academic fields sharing their work. The Workshop was a wonderful way to learn about the interdisciplinary world of drug discovery and development and connect with others in this innovative field.