Webinar
Bridging the gap between AI and the lab in drug discovery
October 01, 2025 04:00 PM Europe/London
The webinar will be held Weds, October 1 2025 at 4-5pm BST, 5-6pm CEST, 11am-12pm EDT, 8-9am PDT
A panel discussion with Nicola McCarthy (Head of Research, Milner Therapeutics Institute), Tim Foley (Lab head, DNA-encoded library selection & pharmacology, Pfizer) and Ben Sidders (Chief Scientific Officer, Biorelate), chaired by Biorelate CEO Daniel Jamieson.
In this webinar, drug discovery research experts discuss opportunities to use AI and data driven approaches to create more robust models for developing actionable hypotheses. In particular, we dive into the opportunities for biopharma to make better use of data for developing mechanistic rationales which will improve drug discovery outcomes for drug developers as well as patients. The thought-leading panelists bring expertise across computational biology as well as experimental design, in vitro testing and functional genomics screening.
Tim Foley
Tim heads the DNA-encoded library selection biology & pharmacology lab at Pfizer's R&D headquarters in Groton, CT, and is an associate editor of the NIH Assay Guidance Manual. His lab applies fundamentals of chemistry & biology to discover starting points for small molecule projects in Pfizer’s global portfolio Tim earned his PhD in Chemistry from Mike Burkart’s lab at UC San Diego and completed postdoctoral training in plate-based pharmacology & HTS with Anton Simeonov at the NIH Chemical Genomics Center (now NCATS). In 2014 he joined Pfizer’s Primary Pharmacology Group in Groton to build gene-family focused platforms and support pharmacology needs of their burgeoning Centers for Therapeutic Innovation (CTI) incubator for academic collaborations. In 2017 he began an effort to develop DNA-Encoded Library screening capabilities within Pfizer and founded the DEL Biology & Pharmacology lab in 2019.
Nicola McCarthy
Nicola oversees both the wet and dry labs of the Milner Institute, where we are developing our own research programme and target discovery pipeline. The methods and approaches being used are disease-agnostic and we are currently applying these in oncology, respiratory disease, metabolic disorders, infectious disease, inflammatory bowel disease and CNS diseases.
Nicola has a degree in Anatomical Studies and a PhD focused on apoptosis and cancer. She has a wealth of experience from a career in academic, science publishing and industry roles, and joined MTI as our Consortium Manager in 2021. Nicola became our interim deputy director from 2022 to 2023, before moving into her current role as Head of Research
Ben Sidders
Dr Ben Sidders, Chief Scientific Officer at Biorelate, has been working at the forefront of pharma data science for the last two decades. Formerly Executive Director and Head of Early Data Science within Oncology R&D at AstraZeneca, responsible for advancing the company’s understanding of disease through computational oncology, Ben also previously spent eight years at Pfizer, and has extensive experience of many aspects of drug discovery for major pharma. He is especially passionate about immuno-oncology, network biology and the role of bioinformatics within drug discovery. Ben has a PhD in Molecular Biology & Bioinformatics from the University of London where his thesis focused on the development of predictive markers for the diagnosis of asymptomatic Tuberculosis. He holds patents for two clinical diagnostics and has authored over 30 scientific publications.
Daniel Jamieson
Dr Daniel Jamieson founded Biorelate after supporting the successful identification of drug repurposing opportunities with Pfizer in a groundbreaking project to curate the first-ever knowledge graph to represent the pain interactome.