UH Drug Discovery Institute

David Roush, Ph.D., UH alumnus and Distinguished Scientist at Merck, presented Biologics: Rational Molecular and Process Design Enabled by Computational Modeling to the Drug Discovery Institute on October 6.

Roush has long been a pioneer in the development of computational and modeling methods for the development of novel biological medicines and the processes used to produce them. He is interested in fashioning sufficiently economical processes, which can be made widely-available to patients.

Roush explained that these activities are extremely labor- and resource-intensive because they involve enormous numbers of sophisticated experiments to test new product and process designs. They also must address specific challenges. Two examples include the undesired binding of a drug candidate to non-target molecules in the body and the removal of trace impurities closely resembling the actual product during purification.

Over decades of steady progress, a new era of product and process design based on molecular understanding and modeling is emerging, one in which laborious and time-consuming experiments will be less required because of fundamental molecular understanding and advances in computational modeling.