2021 Scientific Achievement and Innovation – Dr. Ratmir Derda
This award recognizes an individual or a team responsible for a breakthrough innovation with commercial application.

“Dr. Ratmir Derda’s use of proprietary algorithms and machine learning to accelerate drug discovery is providing new and better drug leads for therapeutics, imaging and diagnostics. His company, 48 Hour Discovery builds on long standing expertise at the University of Alberta in the fields of glycomics and machine learning,” said Robb Stoddard, President and CEO of BioAlberta.

In 2018 Dr. Derda founded 48Hour Discovery, which offers rapid discovery of pharmaceutical leads in the space of days rather than months. The company’s technology platform, based on five patents developed by Dr. Derda, combines proprietary algorithms and unique billion-scale DNA encoded molecular libraries, to accelerate drug discovery to find new and better drug leads for therapeutics, imaging and diagnostics. The company builds on long standing expertise at the University of Alberta in the fields of glycomics and machine learning.

Accepting this award, Dr. Ratmir Derda said: “It is an honour to have my research and translational work to be recognized by BioAlberta. The Derda Lab in the Department of Chemistry at the University of Alberta and the UofA biotech spinoff 48Hour Discovery Inv have been actively expanding the use of DNA-encoded technologies for discovery of molecular interactions, reactions and drug lead candidates. With these efforts and support from the university and provincial stakeholders we hope to position the UofA, the province of Alberta and Canada on the world arena of biotechnology innovations. This award will help us to continue our growth alongside other research groups and pharma/biotech companies that combine the power of DNA and Chemistry to yield important advances in fundamental areas like protein-ligand interactions, glycobiology and reaction discovery as well as translational advances in the areas of drug lead discovery for clinically-important targets that cannot be addressed by traditional drug discovery technologies. The advances that led to this award would not be possible without long-term, generous support from federal grants (NSERC, CIHR, IRAP), provincial funding (Alberta Innovates), our supporters at numerous pharmaceutical companies and research initiatives like GlycoNet, Canadian Glycomics Network.”

Republished from the official news release.