Interviewed by Marilynn Larkin

Dr. Kolb welcomes the opportunity to serve as President of SBS. He is a founding member of the society and a member of its first Board of Directors. He has participated in an official capacity at most of the annual meetings—most recently, as program chair for the SBS 9th Annual Conference & Exhibition in Portland, OR. He also serves on the Editorial Board for the Journal of Biomolecular Screening. His appointment as president, he said, “is a valued vote of confidence from the SBS Board of Directors that I can continue to help move the society forward in its second decade.”

What do you hope to accomplish during your tenure?

AK: I would like to continue the trend of the past few years—namely, helping the society to adapt to the changing world of drug discovery. We’re starting to make some real headway in this regard, and we have to continue moving in the direction of reaching out to new disciplines that are not currently as well served by other societies. ADMET and assay validation are good examples. They fit right into the core of what SBS is doing, and there’s no society to support these scientists. I think SBS can help with that.

At the same time, we will continue to focus our meetings and programs on our core membership. We’re not leaving them behind; we’re simply expanding a little upstream and downstream of the typical screening membership. The bottom line is that we want to keep the members who have been with us over the years and made us successful, while we have more people join in. We want to do this while still maintaining a small society environment.

Do you envision adding new committees?

AK: We would always consider adding (or dropping) committees based on the needs of the members and how we may best serve their interests. I think it would be valuable first to look at the committees we have now, and to find ways to reinvigorate some of the ones that haven’t been as active as they could be. We’ll need to get them moving again, perhaps by having the Board and the Executive Committee work more closely with the chairpersons of those committees to help them advertise and get more member participation. The committees are very important to the function and growth of SBS and also offer a chance for members to directly participate in the future of the society.

What about new SBS products or services?

AK: We definitely would like to expand the offerings of SBS. We have a highly respected journal that is getting better every year and we have an extremely popular and well attended annual meeting. But we need to make our knowledge and resources even more accessible. The regional meetings that have been held over the past few years—in Spain (co-sponsored with SEBIOT, a Spanish biotechnology society), at Harvard University, and in San Francisco—are a good start. A number of societies and organizations now want us to co-sponsor meetings with them. We need to take advantage of those opportunities as best we can within our resources. That is something we might see more of in the coming years. Sponsoring more virtual seminars will bring drug discovery knowledge right to the desks of our members. This will not only educate and inform scientists who cannot attend our meetings, it also serves as a method to show non-members the value of SBS.

One of the challenges we will be facing over the next two years is the change of the date of the annual meeting from September to April. We are having a meeting in Seattle in September, 2006, and then a meeting in Montreal in April, 2007. That will be a real challenge for the staff, whose time is already very much focused on the annual meeting. The conference committee, the program chairs, and the staff will all have to manage that transition from September to April without losing sight of our other goals.

You mentioned a need for better understanding of the drug-discovery process among industry scientists. Can you elaborate?

AK: The pharmaceutical industry has encompassed virtually all fields of biology and chemistry. You can’t find an industry that has more biological, chemical, or automation expertise. But what is still lacking is a better understanding of the whole drug-discovery process, and where everyone fits in that picture.

It used to be that there were different silos of expertise in drug companies that didn’t talk to each other. Information was passed off from one silo to another without real understanding. That has changed over the years. Now, people in target biology better understand what screeners are doing. Screeners better understand what metabolic chemists are doing in order to select and optimize leads. So there is more communication going on.

However, I think we could use better education and understanding about the whole process. That way, a bench scientist in screening could better communicate with the chemist who is modifying his leads, and they could then better communicate with the target area regarding what they need for a potential candidate.

Part of what has prevented this from happening until recently is that different departments are judged by their own criteria—and, naturally, they tend to focus on how they are judged. If, for example, you tell me I have to screen 100,000 compounds a day, I will screen 100,000 compounds a day; it won’t matter if they have value to the therapeutic area or if the hits develop into leads or into new drug candidates.

But that is changing now that management is making the goals and objectives more focused on the overall objectives of the company, not on individual departments. Now we have to look at what HTS specialists are doing in terms of how it fits into what target biologists and chemists are doing, and with the people further downstream who are eventually going to be involved in animal studies.

As president of SBS, what will be your first area of focus?

AK: I wish there could be just one focus. There are several things that must be addressed simultaneously. One major effort will be to work with staff and the Board to evaluate the proposed initiatives of SBS to see if they meet our strategic purpose. A number of these activities have been discussed, such as regional meetings; now, we have to get them implemented. One idea is to do regional meetings targeted to a special topic, rather than doing general drug-discovery meetings. Maybe it’s time to try one of those.

As noted earlier, there’s also been interest in doing joint meetings, including meetings outside the United States. Most of the meetings we have done in the past have been organized entirely by SBS. I think we need to reach out to other non-profit societies for the benefit of the whole field of drug discovery. Reaching out to other organizations goes beyond organizing meetings. Academic and government drug-discovery programs are also something SBS should encourage, support, and participate in.

Our annual meetings have included more and more areas outside the mainstream of screening. We’ve had sessions on ADME and in silico screening. In Geneva we are offering four sessions on target biology as it relates to drug discovery. We have to evaluate those sessions to see if these are what the membership wants, and if they help to expand the society. If they do, and they are areas the membership agrees we should move into, then we’ll need to put a little more focus on them going forward.

Something SBS has always had on the top of its priorities, and we will continue to focus on this, are ways to serve the members, recruit more members, and encourage member participation in SBS programs.