COFES Report: Can CAD guys change the pharmaceutical industry?
Friday morning at COFES in Scottsdale Arizona we had a very unusual speaker:
Omid Moghadam
Research Fellow
Harvard Medical School
That's right — Harvard Medical School. So why a Harvard Medical School guy at the Congress On the Future of Engineering Software?
Because Omid, an ex-Intel exec, believes that CAD software vendors have just the right skills to build a new generation of tools for predictive design of new pharmaceutical drugs. Wow.
This was a *really cool* talk — hats off to the COFES organizers.
Omid's thesis is that drug discovery is still done in this trial and error way — test a whole bunch of compounds and see what works. Long times, lots of money, and even then it may not work on all people.
Omid believe drugs should be designed not found. There have been some attempts to do this, but they have not worked out very well. Omid thinks that biochemists just don't understand development or business models for software products. He thinks CAD software people have the right skills to do this.
Wow — cool idea.
Thanks Omid for a great, smart, thought-provoking talk.
– Jon