Approaches to detect and treat virus outbreaks

The recent global outbreak of COVID-19 has highlighted how Pandemics stress all aspects of healthcare and cause significant economic, social and political disruption, exposing gaps in our abilities to detect new or emerging pathogens, especially when no treatments exist. The need for millions of healthy patients to be vaccinated or infected patients to be treated has spurred renewed interest in vaccines as well as approaches to accelerate drug development timelines to deliver safe and efficacious treatments to market. Today there are over 50 treatments in various stages of development for COVID-19.

This presentation is an overview of the role Biacore SPR is playing in COVID-19 and highlight how modern platform technology are accelerating our ability to respond to emerging pandemics from understanding structure and function to the development of diagnostics and therapeutic interventions.

Speaker:
Paul Belcher
Product Strategy Manager, Biacore, Cytiva

Dr. Belcher is the Global Product Strategy Manager, Biacore at Cytiva. He received his Ph.D. in organic chemistry from the University of Newcastle upon Tyne in the United Kingdom in 2003. During his postdoctoral training, he worked under George Pettit at Arizona State University working on the first total synthesis of the natural product dolastatin 16, a potential cancer therapeutic. While at Arizona State, Paul established a label-free screening program for screening/characterization of large libraries of compounds to enable the development of synthetic probes to challenging targets. At GE his focus has been on the value of drug-target binding kinetics for investigating structure-activity relationships and drug efficacy. He also works on fragment-based lead discovery, interacting predominately with small molecule screening groups within academia and industry to implement and optimize label-free methods for drug discovery. He is a frequent speaker and has given over 400 lectures at conferences and pharma/biotech industry sites and Universities globally.