Introduction to Preclinical Drug Discovery - Registration no longer possible

Pedro Hermkens (PhD) has a scientific background in organic chemistry, pharmacology and biochemistry. He worked at Organon, Schering-Plough and MSD (Merck) in the Medicinal Chemistry Department for 21 years where he was responsible for projects in several therapeutic areas as team leader. Furthermore, he has experience in the early stage of the process as Discovery Leader. In this role he was responsible for managing target identification & validation, assay development, screening & hit identification & optimization. In 2013 he became director of the Institute Applied BioSciences & Chemistry of the HAN University of Applied Sciences. In this position he was responsible for education and research of this institute. In 2020 he accepted the position of lector Drug Discovery at the HAN University of Applied Sciences.

Joost Uitdehaag is an accomplished expert in oncology drug discovery. He transformed preclinical concepts into more than a dozen clinical candidates and had an insider's perspective on the discovery and development of the blockbuster drug acalabrutinib and world's best selling cancer drug pembrolizumab. He has plenty of drug discovery experience both in industry and academia. As Head of Biology at Crossfire Oncology, he is currently developing effective degrader-antibody conjugates . Before that, he worked at AstraZeneca where he chaired the global committee for scouting and validating new targets in haematology. As founding member of the biotech company NTRC, he was instrumental in bringing the TTK/PLK1 inhibitor BAL-0891 to clinical phase. He got his Ph.D. at the university of Groningen and was a EMBO post doc at the university of Oxford. He is the author of >130 publications and co-author on >5 patents, h-index 31. He regularly gives lectures on drug target validation for a.o. HAN, Avans and Radboud University and has written a biomedical thriller set in the world of drug discovery.