Topics
Researcher Kushal Rugjee from Screening BU to Present a Poster at ELRIG’s Drug Discovery 2025
2025.10.17
Our researcher, Kushal Rugjee from the Screening Business Unit, will deliver an poster presentation at ELRIG’s Drug Discovery 2025, to be held from October 21 to 22, 2025, in Liverpool, UK.
If you plan to attend the conference, we encourage you to join the session and hear the presentation.
Conference Name: ELRIG’s Drug Discovery 2025
Date & Time: October 22 (Wed) 13:00 – 13:45
Location: Liverpool, UK
Title: Axcelead’s AI-Powered Hit Identification Platform with a Proprietary Compound Library Achieving High Success Rates
Presentation Summary
Axcelead’s unique assets include a high-throughput screening (HTS) platform and a compound library of over 1.2 million compounds originally inherited from multiple pharmaceutical companies, including Takeda. We offer HTS services across diverse and focused subsets of this library. Furthermore, we have access to a virtual library of approximately 10 billion compounds, which can be used for AI-based virtual screening. Compounds of interest can then be rapidly synthesized through parallel synthesis platform at Axcelead.
To accelerate your lead-finding campaign, we leverage our proprietary AI model, trained on our high-quality database which consists of more than 6,000 experimental datasets associated with a subset of our over 2 million compound library, covering many target classes including GPCRs, enzymes, and ion channels. This AI-driven approach can be applied to hit expansion—generating novel chemotypes—as well as to ADME prediction.
This poster highlights our highly successful hit identification platform, which plays a critical role in the early stages of drug discovery. When combined with AI-powered hit expansion and prioritization technologies, Axcelead accelerates the path from screening to lead creation with exceptional efficiency. Our approach enables clients to move forward with confidence, backed by the pharma-grade compound library, data, expertise, and innovation.
Axcelead DDP’s Soulution
• High-throughput screening (HTS) using focused subsets derived from a 1.2M+ compound library inherited from multiple pharmaceutical companies
• AI-powered hit expansion and ADME prediction leveraging 6000+ experimental datasets to build highly accurate models
• Access to a 10B virtual compound library ready for rapid parallel synthesis enables quick SAR analysis
Kushal Rugjee, Screening Business Unit
Kushal obtained his PhD from the Drug Discovery Unit at the University of Dundee in 2017. He then joined the Alzheimer’s Research UK Drug Discovery Institute at the University of Cambridge as a Research Associate, where he developed assays for high-throughput screening.
In 2019, he moved to AstraZeneca, UK, starting as a Senior Scientist and later advancing to Associate Principal Scientist. At AstraZeneca, he contributed to multiple projects towards clinical candidate nominations and served as Biology Lead on a biologics project.
In 2025, Kushal joined Axcelead as a Principal Scientist, where he currently leads several projects within the Screening Business Unit.