Date: 5 November 2026 (Thursday)
Time: 4pm GMT | 5pm CET | 11am ET | 8am PT
Early-phase drug discovery has become increasingly predictive. Safety assessment, for the most part, has not, offering opportunities to save significant time and resources, while improving safety outcomes.
Thanks to libraries of structured data and increasingly powerful models, early-phase discovery teams now take a more efficient, predictive approach to molecule design, optimisation and prioritisation.
However, once a candidate is passed into preclinical development, safety assessment is still largely driven by literature precedent and based onmuch more limited data.
In this fireside chat, Optibrium™ CEO Matt Segall sits down with Attila Csikász-Nagy, CEO of Cytocast, a professor and researcher with a background in computational and systems biology. Cytocast predicts clinical side effects by modelling how a compound’s off-target interactions affect biological pathways and tissues. They will discuss three frustrating disconnects between discovery and development safety, and strategies to overcome them:
- Process: Compounds move into preclinical development, but the safety team often does not have a line of sight to the discovery team that designed them.
- Data: Discovery data is vast, structured and increasingly accessible, while development data is often unshared and hard to use.
- Approach: Discovery uses mechanistic, molecular-level prediction, while safety assessment still leans on literature precedent and read-across.
Who should attend: Discovery scientists, safety and toxicology scientists, and project leads involved in moving compounds from discovery into development.
The discussion will be followed by a live Q&A, so bring your questions for the speakers.
Meet the speakers
Matt Segall, PhD
CEO, Optibrium™
Matt has a Master of Science in Computation from the University of Oxford and a PhD in Theoretical Physics from the University of Cambridge.
As Associate Director at Camitro (UK), ArQule Inc. and then Inpharmatica, he led a team developing predictive ADME models and state-of-the-art intuitive decision-support and visualisation tools for drug discovery.
In January 2006, he became responsible for management of Inpharmatica’s ADME business, including experimental ADME services and the StarDrop™ software platform.
Following the acquisition of Inpharmatica, Matt became Senior Director responsible for BioFocus DPI’s ADMET division and, in 2009, led a management buyout of the StarDrop™ business to found Optibrium™.
Attila Csikász-Nagy, PhD
CEO, Cytocast
Masters in bioengineering and PhD in chemistry from Budapest University of Technology and Economics (Hungary)
Postdoc at Virginia Tech (US), PI at Microsoft Research – University of Trento Centre for Computational and Systems Biology (Italy), Senior lecturer at King’s College London (UK), Professor at Pázmany University (Hungary). Founder of CL-IC Technologies Ltd (2014-18, UK) and Cytocast (2019-, Hungary)
Leading computational systems biologists, developed some of the earliest mathematical models of cell cycle regulation, later applying this expertise to whole-cell chemical reaction modelling and integrating deep-learning and machine learning to create a pipeline for predictive clinical safety assessments.
