Drugathon 2023

• The application starts 1^st November 2023
• The application deadline 1^st January 2024
• The final decision on the pre-selected applications is 15^th January 2024
• The project starts officially on 1^st February 2024

What about Discovery Pro Drugathon?

The initiation aims to gather seasoned drug discoverers and designers on a definite research goal targeting the identification of novel drug candidates to combat rare and serious diseases.  

What is the scope of the research goals of the Drugathon 2023?

• Identification of small-molecule candidates targeting immune-oncology targets.
• Identification of drug candidates combating Alzheimer’s disease.
• Identification of drug candidates combating children’s choroid plexus carcinoma.
• Identification of drug candidates combating cancer resistance.

How should I begin my project to meet the directives of Drugathon 2023?

• If you have synthesized compounds and don’t know how promising it is as drug candidate, you can come and check for the probable biological target in Drug discovery pro. Validation of the candidates through biology testing is available in our partners’ laboratories.
• You can check in Drug discovery pro to see if a drug candidate shares any similarities with other chemical entities that have demonstrated potent activity against other targets if you need to explore new molecular mechanisms for a drug candidate against a biological target other than the known one.
• You can use drug discovery pro’s molecular transformation service to see if your compound can be changed into a more promising drug candidate if you are committed to a particular drug candidate and want to create a new candidate that is just as potent as the existing one but has different physicochemical properties.
• When you are looking for a new candidate against a biological target, you can use drug discovery pro’s hit identification service which applies virtual screening of thousands of well-known and commercially available compounds.
• You can use the computational services of drug discovery in drug discovery pro to identify the possible biological activity of a natural product. In another way, you can explore the structure simplification of the natural product conserving the therapeutic potential using the cheminformatics and molecular transformation technologies in drug discovery pro.

What are the joint efforts of both the drug discovery pro and the Drugathon applicant? 

Drug discovery pro offers all computational services in-house with 20-50% discounts for accepted applicants to Drugathon. Drug discovery pro helps the researcher validate all the computational results with biological testing in the partners’ laboratories with exquisite subsidies depending on the needed test.

The crucially beneficial issue is the broadcasting of several webinars with the accepted applicants in the form of workshops and information sessions that will come across the research projects introduced to Drugathon. These meetings will open great opportunities for applicants to listen to seasoned drug designers and experts from the field.  

Any expenditures needed for instrumental or technological outsourcing from abroad to achieve the research goals will be shared equally by the stakeholders. 

The accepted applicants should share the research results and the overall progress of the research mission with the funding organizations which handle the experiential work.

All research project contributors should work hard on publishing the results in a top-ranked peer-reviewed journal to achieve the Drugathon goal.

What are the Drugathon’s expected outcomes?

• Publishing the research results in a prestigious peer-reviewed journal.
• Enriching the community with innovative thoughts and a broader vision of drug discovery and development is one of the Drugathon’s priceless goals.
• Get the community known with the new flow charts of drug discovery and be aware of the computational tools to speed up the process.
• Patenting the identified new candidates is forecasted for the projects adopting the available technologies and the most updated experiential techniques for getting well-verified data.

Target applicants

• Post-Doctoral
• Academic/Research organizations (group of researchers)
• Pharmaceutical industry

Benchmark of applicants’ selection

• Innovation of the research idea.
• Multiple computational tools used to achieve the project goals.
• Validation of the identified hit or candidate to verify the computational results.
• Fitting of the biological target with the scope of Drugathon 2023.
• Impact of the project outcomes on the community.
• Clear project goals and outcomes.
• Feasibility of research methodologies.
• The project’s milestones are possibly achieved in a year or less.

Terms and conditions

• Parties of the research project should sign a mutual confidentiality agreement for encrypting the shared data among them.
• The accepted applicants should sign a consent stating that the project plan or data submitted to the drug discovery pro are original and owned by them only and no possibility for a third party to claim their ownership of any information or data involved in the project.
• The organizations/companies that sponsored the research would hold the copyright if the project’s data results were to be patented, and the accepted applicant would be regarded as one of the patent inventors since they connect to one of the financing organizations.
• To estimate the progress in the research outputs and the achievement of the project’s milestones, quarterly reports are given to the finance organizations. The funding organizations have the right to deny the mission and close the project’s file if there hasn’t been any progress in the research effort for two consecutive reports. The data results produced by the project’s funding organizations will be their property unless permission is granted in writing by the organizations’ representatives, any attempt to publish, misuse, or submit the data to a third party without their consent is considered an infringement of their intellectual property.