Computational chemistry is already embedded in the drug discovery process. Schrödinger — a company that was founded more than 30 years ago to develop chemical simulation software for biopharmaceutical partners — believes that it should be more foundational still. Having co-founded several biotechs in the past decade, including Nimbus Therapeutics and Morphic Therapeutics, Schrödinger launched its own drug discovery pipeline in 2018 to expand this model. Heading up that effort is Schrödinger Chief Biomedical Scientist Karen Akinsanya. A pharmacologist by training, Akinsanya has more than 20 years industry experience working at the bench, the bedside and then in the boardroom. She now goes back to her research roots, leading the screening of hundreds of billions of compounds against targets of interest. She spoke with Asher Mullard about Schrödinger’s physics-based approach to computational chemistry, the bottlenecks in this approach, and the new opportunities it can open up.
