Conference: Discovery on Target 2026

開催日: September 28 - 2026年10月1日

開催場所: Boston, MA + Virtual

Booth: 516

Discovery on Target brings together drug discovery scientists working across targets, modalities, and therapeutic areas to share how they’re moving candidates forward. Certara is attending to talk through where our Discovery Portfolio is heading, and to show it in action.

Meet us there

Discovery portfolios rarely stay in one modality. Small molecules, peptides, and biologics increasingly sit side by side — but the tools tracking them weren’t always built with that in mind.

D360 and Compound Registration started in small molecule discovery. We’ve spent the last several development cycles extending both to biologics and peptides, so teams can work across modalities in one system instead of stitching several together.

At our booth, we’ll walk through both, step by step.

It’s also the question behind our poster this year — how to register peptides reliably at the sequence level, without the representation problems that come up in practice. More on that below.

Poster Presentation

Toward Canonical HELM Representations for Sequence-Level Peptide Registration Presented by Jan Christopherson

HELM (Hierarchical Editing Language for Macromolecules) gives researchers a flexible way to represent peptides, including non-natural monomers and cyclization. What it doesn’t do is enforce canonicalization — the same molecule can be written as more than one valid HELM string. Converting to atomistic structures and back introduces its own problems for non-natural, cyclic, and constrained cases. This poster walks through those issues and makes the case that a canonical HELM form is achievable: a practical, sequence-level route to duplicate detection and registration that doesn’t require falling back to chemical structure comparison.

Stop by the poster session to talk through the approach with Jan directly.

Jan Christopherson

Senior Solutions Consultant

Jan Christopherson is a Senior Solutions Consultant working in Certara’s Discovery Portfolio. Following a stint at Mettler Toledo focused on laboratory instrument software interfacing and 21CFR compliant validation, he joined Chemaxon – acquired by Certara in 2025 – in 2019, where he has since supported customers through the full application portfolio and lifecycle.