2013 Purdue Pharma Distinguished Lecture at UOIT

The Faculty of Science will welcome University of Toronto researcher Dr. Aled Edwards to campus on Tuesday, September 24 to present the sixth-annual Purdue Pharma Distinguished Lecture.

Dr. Edwards’ lecture is entitled Open Access Drug Discovery.

“As a society, we rely on academia and industry to discover the new medicines on which we rely for our health, says Dr. Edwards. “Unfortunately, the current science and drug discovery ecosystem is not producing enough new medicines to sustain the pharmaceutical sector, nor the cures for society’s most impactful diseases, such as mental illness and dementia. As Canadian society ages, the associated costs of treating these diseases will grow, and eventually cripple our economy.” 

Dr. Edwards believes the system of discovering new medicines needs to change. He will describe efforts to accomplish this, through the creation of a global network of academia and industry who have committed to share their discoveries without patents. This open access drug discovery project, led from Canada, may well evolve into the way in which all medicines are discovered in the future.  

Dr. Edwards is a Professor and holds the Banbury Chair of Medical Research in the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Toronto. In addition to being the Director and CEO of the Structural Genomics Consortium, he is also a Visiting Professor of Chemical Biology at the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom.

Based in Pickering, Ontario, Purdue Pharma is a leading pharmaceutical company that generously funds the lecture series to connect UOIT students with leading scientists and encourage them to explore career opportunities and research options within the health science industry and beyond.

When:
Tuesday, September 24, 2013
7:30 p.m.

Where:
Science Building, Room 2120

RSVP: By September 19, 2013 to events@uoit.ca