SciLifeLab Science Summit 2025 to Focus on ‘Drugging the Undruggable’
On October 1, 2025, researchers from academia and industry will gather at Aula Medica, Karolinska Institutet, for this year’s SciLifeLab Science Summit. The theme, Disruptive Technologies for Drugging the Undruggable, highlights current efforts to develop treatments for “difficult targets”, i.e. biological disease targets molecules, that are out of reach for conventional drug development.
The summit features international keynote speakers, including Ray Deshaies (Amgen/Caltech), Annemieke Aartsma-Rus (Leiden University Medical Center), Dario Neri (Philogen/ETH Zürich), and Eva Nittinger (AstraZeneca), to present new perspectives on how recent advances — from structural biology and genomics to machine learning and chemical biology — are changing what is possible in drug discovery.
The program further includes shorter talks, poster sessions, and plenty of networking opportunities, providing a platform for early-career researchers to engage with experts across disciplines.
SciLifeLab Drug Development Platform – the organizing behind the event – offers integrated drug discovery efforts to the Swedish academic research community.
“We have an impressive track-record in supporting academic researchers with industry-standard infrastructure, expertise, and strategic support to help progress projects towards preclinical proof-of-concept that help attract investments for further developments into clinical trials, so far, five alumni projects have reached clinical trials. Next, we foresee a need to also support technology development for drug discovery, in particular platform technologies that allow us to drug what is currently undruggable. I see the meeting as a way to get Swedish researchers to embrace this rapidly changing landscape. In addition, the meeting should be a melting pot of knowledge from different perspectives on drug development, and hope for great engagement from academia, industry and healthcare alike”, says Per Arvidsson Director of the Drug Discovery and Development platform.
