The Enamine Drug Discovery Conference in Riga (Latvia) comes to a close today. Our CEO Dr. Christian Lemmen and our SVP Application Science Dr. Marcus Gastreich spent the past four days, 20 to 23 September 2026, at the Radisson Blu Latvija Conference & Spa Hotel, and they return with much more than new scientific input.
More Than a Conference
This year, Enamine celebrates its 35th anniversary. Under normal circumstances, the Kyiv-based company would have marked the occasion at home, but the war in Ukraine made that impossible. Over the past years, Enamine has expanded its production beyond Kyiv to sites in Riga, Frankfurt, and the US, and this year it invited clients and partners to Riga for a multi-track conference covering organic, medicinal, and computational chemistry as well as biology.
What stayed with us most is the resilience of our Ukrainian colleagues. Many of them travelled around 20 hours overland from Ukraine to Riga. It is the same route that around 20 cars take every day, loaded with molecules that researchers across the world are waiting for. We are humbled by this commitment and very thankful for a conference that was organised with great care and professionalism.
Science in Riga
The programme brought together many leading scientists, including:
- Prof. Brian K. Shoichet (UCSF), known for his holistic approaches to drug design including large-scale docking, and co-creator of the ZINC database, who opened the programme with “Directed & Random Walks in Chemical Space”
- Prof. Alessio Ciulli (University of Dundee), a pioneer of targeted protein degradation, with “Protein degraders as chemical tools and drugs”
- Prof. Matthias Rarey (ZBH, Universität Hamburg), whose research on searching ultra-large chemical spaces has shaped the field, with “Rethinking the Funnel: Computational Approaches for Multi-Criteria Screening of Chemical Fragment Spaces”
- Dr. Christian Lemmen, who presented “A Brief History of Chemical Space” in the Computational Chemistry track
Thank You
Our sincere thanks go to Andrey Tolmachov and the entire Enamine team for bringing the community together under difficult circumstances and for keeping molecules moving to the labs that need them. As long-standing partners, BioSolveIT and Enamine jointly provide the searchable Enamine REAL Space, and we are proud to be part of this work.
Thank you as well to all speakers and everyone we met in Riga. If we did not get the chance to talk, we are always happy to connect.