SLAS2014: Spotlight on Phenotypic Drug Discovery

Amid the hustle-and-bustle of the year-end and holidays, all of us at SLAS are also in the final stages of preparing for SLAS2014, taking place only a few short weeks from now, January 18-22 in San Diego. SLAS2014 is the culmination of hundreds of hours of careful planning and presenter recruitment by your peers - the members of the SLAS2014 conference planning committee - and it shows in the breadth and quality of our scientific program. I know you join me in thanking these committee volunteers for their effort and dedication in developing this tremendous program.

With that in mind, I'm pleased to present the latest entry in my SLAS2014 scientific program spotlight series: Phenotypic Drug Discovery . Phenotypic Drug Discovery was a prominent part of the most recent SLAS Webinar Series which attracted significant interest and high marks for quality. (As an aside, the entire series is currently available on demand for SLAS members.) Regardless, if Phenotypic Drug Discovery is of interest to you, SLAS2014 presents a robust program of education and interaction opportunities with like-minded scientists and subject matter experts. Program highlights include:

- Session: Case Studies in Modern Phenotypic Drug Discovery, chaired by Vance Lemmon, University of Miami
- Turning the Hearing Problem Inside Out: In vivo Phenotypic Screening for Small Molecules to Prevent Hearing Loss, Presenter: Edwin W. Rubel, PhD, Virginia Merrill Bloedel Professor of Hearing Sciences, University of Washington, Seattle, WA
- Where's the Target? The Use of Phenotypic Screening to Discover Innovative Drug Candidates, Presenter: Rebecca M. Pruss, PhD, Chief Scientific Officer, TROPHOS, Marseille, France
- High-Content Phenotypic Profiling of Three-Dimensional Tissue by Biodynamic Imaging, Presenter: David Nolte, President, Animated Dynamics, West Lafayette, IN
- Heterogeneity in the Response of Cancer Cells to Cytokine Stimulation and STAT3 Inhibitors: Determining a Heterogeneity Index, Presenter: D. Lansing Taylor, PhD, Director, University of Pittsburgh Drug Discovery Institute & Allegheny Foundation Professor of Computational and Systems Biology, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA
- Special Session: Phenotypic vs. Target-Based Drug Discovery
- The Value of Phenotypic Assays to Drug Discovery, Presenter: David C. Swinney, PhD, Institute for Rare and Neglected Diseases Drug Discovery, Mountain View, CA
- Target -Based or Phenotypic Drug Discovery - Which Is Better or Is that the Wrong Question? Presenter: Frank Sams-Dodd, Willingsford Ltd., Lyndhurst, United Kingdom
- Phenotypic Versus Target-Based Assays: Yin and Yang, Presenter: Melvin Reichman, PhD, Senior Investigator, LIMR Chemical Genomics Center (LCGC), Wynnewood, PA
- A New Perspective on Phenotypic vs. Target-Based Screening, Presenter: Bernard Munos, InnoThink Center for Research in Biomedical Innovation, Indianapolis, IN
- SIG: Phenotypic Drug Discovery, chaired by Jonathan Lee, Eli Lilly

For additional details, visit SLAS2014.org, where you can review the entire scientific program, peruse abstracts and even customize your conference itinerary with the recently-published SLAS2014 Event Scheduler.
Happy holidays to you and yours. I look forward to seeing you next month in San Diego.

Steven Hamilton (a.k.a The Lab Man)
SLAS Director of Education
Shamilton@slas.org [ mailto:Shamilton@slas.org ]