• Research

MEDIA ADVISORY: Public-Private ATOM Consortium Aims to Cut Preclinical Cancer Drug Discovery from Six Years to One

By Laura Kurtzman

Who:

  • Patricia Falcone, Deputy Director, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
  • David Heimbrook, Director, Frederick National Laboratory for Cancer Research
  • John Baldoni, Senior Vice President R&D, GSK
  • Alan Ashworth, President, UCSF Helen Diller Family Comprehensive Cancer Center

What: Scientists from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Frederick National Laboratory for Cancer Research, GSK, and the University of California, San Francisco will hold a briefing to discuss Accelerating Therapeutics for Opportunities in Medicine (ATOM), an ambitious effort to transform the way cancer drugs are discovered.

The consortium aims to create an open and sharable platform integrating high-performance computing, biological data from public and industry sources, and emerging biotechnologies to dramatically accelerate the discovery of effective cancer therapies.

Why: ATOM aims to transform cancer drug discovery from a time-consuming, sequential, and high-risk process into an approach that is rapid, integrated, and produces better outcomes for patients, using supercomputers to pretest many molecules simultaneously for safety and efficacy.

When:

  • 7:30 to 8:30 AM PT (10:30 to 11:30 AM ET), Friday, Oct. 27, 2017
  • Breakfast starts at 7 AM
  • This briefing is scheduled to coincide with the World Conference of Science Journalists meeting in San Francisco.

Where: Foothill C Room, San Francisco Marriott Marquis, 780 Mission St., San Francisco, CA, 94103

Dial in: (toll free) 877 888 4294, 785 424 1877; Conference ID: ATOM

(UK toll-free dial in: 0‑808‑101‑1183; numbers for other countries available upon request.)

*Breakfast is provided by the ATOM consortium.

UC San Francisco (UCSF) is a leading university dedicated to promoting health worldwide through advanced biomedical research, graduate-level education in the life sciences and health professions, and excellence in patient care. It includes top-ranked graduate schools of dentistry, medicine, nursing and pharmacy; a graduate division with nationally renowned programs in basic, biomedical, translational and population sciences; and a preeminent biomedical research enterprise. It also includes UCSF Health, which comprises three top-ranked hospitals, UCSF Medical Center and UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospitals in San Francisco and Oakland, and other partner and affiliated hospitals and healthcare providers throughout the Bay Area.

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