The 38th Annual Meeting of the Great Lakes Chapter of the American Society for Pharmacology and Experimental Therapeutics (ASPET-GLC) was held at Northwestern University in Chicago on June 13, 2025. One hundred and seventy pharmacologists, biologists, computer scientists, chemists, clinicians, and students from both academia and the pharmaceutical industry in the Midwest were in attendance. To our knowledge, this was the highest meeting attendance ever at a GLC Annual Meeting, topping the previous high of 166 from 2024. Twenty-eight ASPET members attended, and an additional six attendees joined ASPET subsequent to the meeting.
The theme of the conference was AI, Big Data, and Beyond: Computational Approaches for Drug Discovery and Pharmacology. The keynote speaker was Nicholas Tatonetti, PhD, of Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, whose presentation was entitled, “AI and Real-World Data for Biomedical Discovery.” The Main Symposium also featured other nationally and internationally renowned experts in computational pharmacology. The Main and Young Investigator symposia included presentations in which clinical data was mined using advanced data techniques such as AI and machine learning (ML) to uncover new side effects and drug-drug interactions, and to identify patient subgroups based on patterns of clinical data (i.e., sub-phenotypes) that may be more responsive to certain drug treatments. To complement these drug development presentations, several symposia talks delved into applications of these advanced data techniques toward advances in drug discovery. In particular, emerging strategies for AI/ML-driven drug design were presented and computational approaches to protein engineering were discussed.
Main Symposium speakers included:
- Sanjiv Shah, MD (Stone Endowed Professor and Director for Bluhm Cardiovascular Institute, Center for Deep Phenotyping and Precision Medicine, and Heart Failure with Preserved Ejection Fraction (HFpEF) Program; Northwestern University, “Leveraging Machine Learning to Address the Challenges of Drug Development for Heterogeneous Clinical Syndromes”)
- John Karanicolas, PhD (Head of Computational Drug Discovery, AbbVie, “Emerging Strategies for AI/ML-Driven Drug Design”)
- Gabriel Rocklin, PhD (Assistant Professor, Northwestern University, “Large-scale Discovery, Analysis, and Design of Protein Energy Landscapes”)
The Young Investigator Symposium afforded the opportunity for early-career faculty to share their science. Speakers in this symposium included:
- Wei Liang, PhD (AbbVie, “Vision-Based AI for Analyzing Primate Behavior”)
- Sudarshan Babu, PhD (Chan Zuckerberg Biohub Chicago, “Novel Molecular Representations for AI-Driven Discovery”)
- Shilpa Sharma, PhD (University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, “Mapping the Free Energy Landscape of AF9-BCOR: Unraveling Intrinsically Disordered Protein Interactions in Leukemia”)
In addition to science focused on advances in computational approaches for pharmacology, the poster session also featured presentations from a wide variety of other pharmacology subfields, including studies evaluating the efficacy of new pharmacological agents as well as studies elucidating novel pathophysiological mechanisms underlying disease. Fifty-two posters were presented at this session. As part of the award, all trainees who placed in the poster competition were given complimentary ASPET membership. This is in-line with the Chapter’s mission to promote the benefits of ASPET to trainees in the Midwest.
The Lunch and Learn Career Development events at the meeting afforded many opportunities for cross-disciplinary collaboration and learning. One of the major goals for the session is for trainees to learn about a variety of biomedical careers from mentors in the pharmaceutical and biotech industry as well as academia. Mentors included a medical writer, a science policy and advocacy expert, a biostatistician, a toxicologist consultant who guides companies to gain marketing approval for new therapeutic agents, and an assistant professor who has recently set up her own lab.
Represented institutions included eighteen universities and research institutes, eleven pharmaceutical or biotech companies, and two healthcare centers. To get more involved in the Great Lakes Chapter, please connect with us through social media (search “GLC ASPET”) or contact outgoing GLC president Dr. James O’Donnell at james.odonnell@rosalindfranklin.edu.
