adMare Industry Builder Series Featuring Dr David Altshuler: Humanizing Drug Discovery

On February 16th, Dr. David Altshuler will join the adMare Industry Builder series to discuss to discuss how human genetic information can guide the drug discovery process.

Despite great progress in medical science much of human biology remains unexplored, and for many serious diseases, treatments remain inadequate.   The two concepts are inexorably linked, as a deep knowledge of human disease pathophysiology is fundamental to the process of discovering and testing new medicines.   Human genetics offers an approach to connect clinical phenotypes in the population to molecular mechanisms in the laboratory, enabling (a) testing of existing hypotheses for relevance to human disease, (b) generation of new hypotheses for study in the laboratory, (c) nomination of drug targets as a guide to therapeutic discovery, and (d) prediction of future disease risk or response to treatment.   Over the past 30 years molecular causes of thousands of human diseases have been identified, first for rare diseases caused by a single genetic mutation of large effect, and more recently for common diseases that are influenced by the combination of many genes, environment and chance.

Join us for this webinar! Dr. Altshuler will discuss the development of human genetics as a tool to study human disease, and the application of human genetic information to guide the process of drug discovery in type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease and cystic fibrosis (online event).
 

About Dr. Altshuler

David Altshuler, M.D, Ph.D., is Executive Vice President, Global Research and Chief Scientific Officer at Vertex Pharmaceuticals. In this role, Dr. Altshuler leads Vertex internal and external innovation, inclusive of research, preclinical and pharmaceutical sciences, as well as corporate data strategy, technology, and engineering. He was founding chair of the Vertex Foundation, and serves as executive sponsor for Vertex University and STEAM Education.

Prior to Vertex, Dr. Altshuler was a Founding Core Member, Deputy Director and Chief Academic Officer at the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT, a professor at Harvard Medical School and a physician at Massachusetts General Hospital. His academic laboratory led the three major projects that characterized and catalogued human genetic variation — the SNP Consortium, HapMap and 1,000 Genome Projects — and pioneered the methods and practice of genetic analysis of common human diseases. The Obama White House named Dr. Altshuler a Champion of Change for his leadership in creating and leading the Global Alliance for Genomic and Health.