Session 3: Infectious Disease: SARS-CoV-2 and Beyond

The COVID-19 pandemic catalyzed an unprecedented effort to establish vaccine, diagnostic and therapeutic tools to fight SARS-CoV-2. Remarkable successes underlie todays’ deployment of high-efficacy vaccines, and fast, affordable diagnostics. However, the area of therapeutic drug discovery lagged behind, and as yet there are just a handful of clinically proven drugs showing promise to treat COVID-19. It is clear that in the future new technologies and strategies for high-content screening for early drug discovery could hold the key to rethinking how we go about drug-discovery, and our preparedness for future emergent infectious disease outbreaks. This session invites keynote research scientists to share with us their views on how existing technologies for early drug discovery might be better deployed against infectious disease targets like SARS-CoV-2, and what new technologies and strategies look promising for the future.