Due to the rapid and steady growth of available low-cost computer power, the use of computers for discovering and designing new drugs is becoming a central topic in modern molecular biology and medicinal chemistry. 

Medicine is rapidly evolving and new drugs, devices, and techniques are constantly being introduced to improve patients’ care. Going back almost 400 years, the practice of medicine has not changed much but there has been an improvement in the field of medicine due to the emerging technology especially in the diagnostics area.  

The Faculty of Health and Environmental Sciences hosted its Prestige Research Seminar on 31 October 2016, in response to global changes in drug discovery methods and the role academics and researchers will play in the near future. The seminar follows on from the workshop held on Sunday at the same venue and builds on the theme of the future of drug discovery and the new frontier of computational methods in which Prof. Jack Tuszyński led the discussion around the next global quantum jump in drug discovery that will involve High Performance Computing (HPC). He said that powerful supercomputer will be used to perform, discover and analyze at all stages of development by creating the most sophisticated molecular models of the target protein, screening of billions of drug structures that will be done routinely and screening new drugs via computer for toxicity. “What this means is that new drug discovery will be faster, better and cheaper than before, and it will also provide the opportunity to develop new antiviral drugs, anti-cancer drugs, neurology drugs and drugs for other diseases,” he said. Prof. Tuszyński is a Fellow of the National Institute for Nanotechnology of Canada. He is an Allard Chair and Professor in Experimental Oncology in the Department of Oncology at the University of Alberta’s Cross Cancer Institute and a Professor in the Department of Physics. 

He heads an interdisciplinary team that focuses on building “designer drugs” able to kill tumors that eventually lead to improved cancer cures. He is also on the editorial board of a number of international journals including the Journal of Biological Physics, Journal of Biophysics and Structural Biology (JBSB), Quantum Biosystems, Research Letters in Physics, Water: a Multidisciplinary Research Journal and Interdisciplinary Sciences-Computational Life Sciences. 

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Prof. Jack Tuszyński, a world-renowned bioinformatics scholar, University of Alberta, Canada.