Open Innovation with Astra Zeneca

EPOC are delighted to host Astra Zeneca for an interactive session on their Postdoc programme, their new centre for Lead Discovery and their Open Innovation programme.

The event will be broken down as follows:

- AZ postdoc programme (10 mins)

The postdoc programme started in 2011 and is very academically orientated. This session is for postdocs to get an idea of what it is like working in a big pharma environment without giving up an academic career. The emphasis is for postdocs to publish and report at academic conferences as an academic postdoc would do. The positions are for 3 years (nominally 2-3 years) and currently they have around 140 in place across UK, USA and Sweden covering all aspects of AstraZeneca’s research interests.

- AZ Centre for Lead Discovery (20 mins)

In 2018 AstraZeneca will open its new facility at the Cambridge Biomedical Campus/Addenbrookes Hospital site which will be the headquarters for AstraZeneca research and development. This site will also contain the infrastructure for lead discovery by high throughput screening (HTS) of the AZ compound collection for the whole company. The plan is to expand the use of this HTS facility to work with academia to screen academic drug targets too. The idea is that AZ scientists engaged in AZ projects will be working side-by-side with academic scientists engaged in academic projects.

- AZ Open Innovation (20 mins)

The best research on new targets goes on outside of pharma and in recent years there has been a serious effort to engage more openly with academia particularly around sharing compounds which are the main currency of pharma. AstraZeneca have been running an Open Innovation programme since 2011 mainly around sharing of clinically tested compounds for repositioning and sets of compounds (up to 250,000) for screening of novel targets to generate new chemical equity. They also share tool compounds specific for particular targets for preclinical studies. In this presentation, AZ will describe the programme and how to access it. If you are interested in learning more before the presentation there is a wealth of information here https://openinnovation.astrazeneca.com/

These three presentations will then be followed by a 40 minute panel discussion, as well as beer and pizza!

Please register your attendance here.