PharmKDD 2025 Call For Papers

Description
Pharmaceutical research and development (PRD) refers to the process of discovering and developing medicines and treatments. It is an expensive ($1-2.6 billion on average) and time consuming (10-15 years on average) process. Despite the time and monetary investments, historical data shows that the success rate of a new drug from discovery to final approval from the Food and Drug Administration is only around 10%. This fact highlights the urgent need for innovative methods to improve the efficiency and success rate of the PRD process.

There are many steps in the PRD pipeline, which includes target identification, molecule design and synthesis, pre-clinical development, human clinical trials, and post-marketing surveillance. Over the years, large volumes of data have been accumulated from these different steps, which encode evidence and insights of the PRD process. This provides an unprecedented opportunity for developing effective data mining and knowledge discovery (KDD) methods to extract insights from those data to improve the PRD process. Furthermore, advances in deep phenotyping using AI have greatly expanded the disease landscape, capturing a richer spectrum of disease attributes and patient subtypes, which in turn elevates drug discovery efforts by refining target identification and validation—effectively transforming the other side of the therapeutic equation into a more precise, data-driven realm of innovation.

There are lots of examples of recent research developing KDD methods for PRD. However, the existing research has been mostly isolated into different communities focusing on a particular intermediate step, while we cannot have any of these steps fail in order to successfully develop a drug. Therefore, there is an urgent need for a forum to bring together researchers and practitioners from both academia and industry working on different aspects of KDD for PRD, discuss the state-of-the-art research and technologies, and chart the future agenda.

Topics of Interests
All topics on KDD for pharmaceutical research and development are welcome to submit, including but not limited to the following

Drug molecule design and prediction
Foundation models for drug discovery and development
Generative AI and digital twin technologies for pharmaceutical research and development
KDD for preclinical studies, such as cell line and animal models
Large language models for pharmaceutical research and development
Multi-omics analysis for drug discovery and development
Real world data and real world evidence
Pharmaceutical knowledge graph construction and inference
In-silico trials and target trial emulation

Submission Guidelines

Format: We invite short technical papers - up to 5 pages including references and unlimited pages of appendix. All manuscripts should be submitted in a single PDF file including all content, figures, tables, and references, following the new Standard ACM Conference Proceedings Template. For LaTeX users: unzip acmart.zip, make, and use sample-sigconf.tex as a template; Additional information about formatting and style files is available online at ACM Proceedings Template. Additionally, papers must be in the two-column format, with the recommended setting for Latex file: \documentclass[sigconf, anonymous, review]{acmart}.
Camera ready: Accepted papers can have up to 5 pages and unlimited pages of references and appendix. Please use the new acmart.cls when preparing submissions.
Submission: Papers should be submitted at the easychair submission website.
Review: All papers will be double-blinded and peer-reviewed by at least 2 reviewers.
Presentation: While all accepted papers will be presented with posters, high-quality accepted papers will also have the opportunity to participate in the oral/spotlight presentation and win our Best Paper Award(s). All accepted papers are expected to be presented in person. The workshop will not provide support for virtual talks or posters. We will also present accepted papers on our website.
Proceedings: According to the policy of the KDD conference, the accepted papers will NOT be included in proceedings or any form of publication.
Awards: The organizing committee will select best paper award(s).

Timeline

Paper Submission: May 8th, 2025.
Paper Notification: June 8th, 2025.