Seminar: From Drug Combinations to Microplates: Solving Optimisation Problems in Drug Testing

21 Nov 2024

I’m very excited about giving seminar next month as part of SOAF’s seminar series about optimisation problems that arise in the context of drug testing and laboratory experiments. The talk is titled “From Drug Combinations to Microplates: Solving Optimisation Problems in Drug Testing”, and I’ll talk about my ongoing collaboration with the Pharmaceutical Bioinformatics research group (Pharmbio) at Uppsala University.

Date: December 12 at 12:15-13:00

Connect to the seminar here: https://meet.google.com/orn-tdqe-ahh

Abstract: A microplate is a flat surface typically consisting of a 2:3 matrix of wells, such as 96 or 384 wells, and serves as an indispensable tool in modern biomedical laboratories performing large-scale experiments. For example, drug repurposing is a common approach to discovering new therapeutic applications for drugs already approved to treat other diseases. Moreover, there is a need to understand the effects of being exposed to a combination of multiple treatments simultaneously. In these cases, a large number of relevant drugs need to be tested from an extensive library of drugs. Planning and executing such large experiments leads to many exciting optimisation problems.

In this talk, we will first introduce the project and its context, followed by focusing on some of the optimisation problems that arise. In particular, we will present the problem of assigning specific drug combinations onto microplates to reduce the time it takes to set up complete experiments. We will discuss our approach based on constraint programming and present preliminary results.