The Virginia Tech Center for Drug Discovery will cosponsor the VirginiaCancerRx Symposium, which will be held on May 30-31 at the Darden Center at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville.

The event is organized by the Virginia Drug Discovery Consortium, and is also co-sponsored by the Eastern Virginia Medical School, George Mason University, the Inova Schar Cancer Institute, the University of Virginia, and Virginia Commonwealth University.

“The vision of the Consortium is to facilitate collaborative drug discovery, development, and delivery in the Commonwealth, with the capacity to discover drug candidates and drug delivery methods and to develop them to the point that they can be translated to important medicines or devices,” said David Kingston, University Distinguished Professor of Chemistry in Virginia Tech’s College of Science, and Chair of the VirginiaCancerRx Symposium. “Building on mutual strengths and common interests, the Consortium aims to emphasize the benefits of collaboration between Virginia’s universities.”

The event will be preceded by an optional entrepreneurship workshop and luncheon to be held at 11 a.m. May 30th. It will feature keynote speakers, more than 30 poster presentations, and 20 short talks. 

Keynote speakers include

·       Barbara Slusher, professor of neurology, medicine, psychiatry, and neuroscience, director of the Johns Hopkins Drug Discovery Program, and director of the Academic Drug Discovery Consortium;

·       Craig M. Crews, the Lewis B. Cullman Professor of Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology, Chemistry and Pharmacology and executive director of the Yale Center for Molecular Discovery;

·       Rob Kramer, chief science officer of RAKramer Consulting LLC, as well as SalvaRx Group PLC, and Sonnet Biotherapeutics, and former vice president of Bristol Myers and vice-president and head of discovery for oncology therapeutics at Janssen Research & Development; and

·       Otis Brawley, chief medical and scientific officer and executive vice president of the American Cancer Society.

The first Virginia Drug Discovery Consortium Symposium, the VirginiaBrainRx Symposium, was held in spring 2016 in Richmond, Virginia, with participation from researchers from seven different universities.

Kingston serves as chair of the Virginia Tech Center for Drug Discovery.

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Written by Jessie Rogers, of Suffolk, Virginia, a junior in the Department of English, part of the College Liberal Arts and Human Sciences

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