ELRIG Drug Discovery 2026 conference highlights

We’re here at ELRIG Drug Discovery 2026 to meet with researchers across academia and industry, all with the common goal of finding out what’s next for them in drug discovery. Over the past two days, we’ve been speaking to scientists, technology developers and attendees from across the show to find out which ideas are really driving the field forward.

One thing that’s come through strongly in our conversations is just how quickly the drug discovery toolkit is evolving. But new technology alone isn’t the whole story. The question is how these advances translate into better decisions and, ultimately, better medicines.

But improving drug discovery also means improving our understanding of biology itself, from the models researchers use to the ways they can study disease, including mechanisms and targets, with greater biological relevance.

And across the exhibition floor, we’ve seen how those scientific ambitions translate into new tools and workflows designed to help researchers generate better data, work at greater scale, and tackle increasingly complex questions.

But what does the community itself think?

We asked attendees here at the show this year what the biggest opportunity for them is in drug discovery, and what some of the key technologies are that will transform their work over the next three to five years.

I’m excited by quite a few modalities in drug discovery, particularly for rare disease. So I’m excited, of course, about what AI can do to accelerate science and really make an impact. But I’m also excited by antisense oligonucleotides, by RNA editing, gene therapies, CRISPR technology.

All of these different modalities could make a huge difference, and they are now, but even more so in the future.

I think in Alzheimer’s disease, which is a big challenge, there’s also a big opportunity because there are very different types of dementia, particularly Alzheimer’s. We do have a better understanding now of the natural history of disease, and we have a better understanding of which risk factors will identify those at higher risk.

So a combination of blood-based biomarkers, cognitive function, genetic predisposition and, again, through a resource like ARFI Health, we’ll be able to run trials on those very high-risk groups.

And there are drugs which are coming through the pipeline now, and we’ll be able to show if they really do reduce that future risk. So that’s a particular area of interest for us, and given the huge burden of disease, and mortality and morbidity, that’s really a public health imperative.

Because of the different technologies that we have available to us right now, it’s actually understanding what we had that didn’t work before that can work now.

And I think there’s a lot of investment, and I’m seeing a lot of excitement around repurposing. So that can be chemistry repurposing. What small molecules maybe had too high a tox profile that now, with the right biologic associated with it, can have a targeted delivery and then that meaningful small-molecule impact to that cancer, but also being able to widen that therapeutic index because of that modality.

Within my own field, which is looking at how we can use viruses as therapeutic agents, I think one of the areas that’s getting a lot of traction at the moment is the capacity to use viruses to actually reprogram immune cells in the body of the patient themselves.

So rather, say, for example, in CAR T-cell therapies, normally you’d have to take the immune cells out of the body. You’d use a viral vector to transform the T-cells. You would then select those that express the chimeric antigen receptor of interest, expand them, then ship them back and put them back into the patient, which is very time-consuming, laborious, quite invasive for the patient.

So the idea now is that we can actually use the virus directly inside the human body, and the virus will then home in on those immune cells, those T-cells, and transform into CAR T-cells inside the body.

So a lot of that variability that’s introduced by having to take T-cells outside the body, expand them, and reintroduce them again is taken out of the equation. That is very exciting, I think.

The biggest opportunity in drug discovery right now for me is the people. You can have all these tools and gizmos, but you’ve got to pull it all together.

You need the people to do that, and you need a diversity of people. You can’t innovate unless there’s heterogeneity. You have to.

And the opportunity now is to bring these people into a community, and that community will naturally innovate, it will learn, it will collaborate, and it will grow. And that’s exactly what we’ve done today.

To me, that’s what we’ll continue to do.

What’s clear from our conversations here at ELRIG is that there isn’t one technology defining the future of drug discovery. Instead, it’s a combination of better biological models, new ways to interrogate increasingly complex data, and technologies that can turn those insights into more informed decisions.

And perhaps just as importantly, events like this bring those different disciplines together.

Keep an eye out for all of our ELRIG show coverage being released in the next couple of weeks. Check out our dedicated show page, where we have some of the wider coverage sponsoring this year’s event.

And stay with SelectScience as we cover some of the latest science, the people, and the technologies across other key scientific events in the calendar throughout the year.

What drug discovery technologies could transform research over the next three to five years?

ELRIG Drug Discovery 2026 attendees highlighted AI, antisense oligonucleotides, RNA editing, gene therapies and CRISPR. Better biological models, complex data analysis, laboratory technologies and scalable workflows could also help researchers generate stronger data and make more informed decisions.

How could advances in biomarkers improve Alzheimer’s disease drug discovery and clinical trials?

Combining blood-based biomarkers, cognitive function and genetic predisposition could identify people at high risk of Alzheimer’s disease. Resources such as ARFI Health may enable trials in these groups, helping researchers determine whether drugs in the pipeline reduce future disease risk.

How could in vivo CAR T-cell therapy improve cancer treatment workflows?

Viruses could reprogram a patient’s T-cells into CAR T-cells directly inside the body. This approach may avoid removing, transforming, expanding and reinfusing immune cells, reducing a process described as time-consuming, laborious, invasive and vulnerable to variability.