Applying Real-World Drug Discovery Experience in the OpenADMET ExpansionRx Blind Challenge
Friday, March 6th 2026 at 8 AM (PT) | 11 AM (ET) | 5 PM (CEST)
Reserve Your Webinar SeatJoin us for this webinar, where Jason Wang from Merck & Co and Davide Boldini from Merck KGaA, top performers in the recent OpenADMET ExpansionRx Blind Challenge, describe how they drew on years of experience in drug discovery programs to make critical decisions about model architecture, pre-training, data augmentation, and other factors.
Key Learnings Explored:
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Foundation models consistently outperform alternatives.
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Supervised pre-training on diverse multitask data is an effective strategy.
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Easy-to-use MLOps and SWE tooling are key to improve model quality and impact.
Jason Wang
Senior Scientist at Merck
Jason graduated from Columbia University with a BA in biochemistry and a BA in computer science. He continued his PhD studies with Professor Abigail Doyle at Princeton University and UCLA, focusing on the application of machine learning in synthetic organic chemistry. In 2025, he joined Merck as a senior scientist in the modeling & informatics group, working on various applications of data science/AI/ML to accelerate discovery chemistry efforts.
Davide Boldini
Senior Scientist at Merck Healthcare KGaA
Davide Boldini studied chemistry at the University of Milan-Bicocca for his BSc and applied analytical chemistry at the University College London for his MSc. He then did his PhD at the Technical University of Munich in the group of Prof. Stephan Sieber, where he worked on developing cheminformatics tools for modeling high throughput screening data. Today, he works on predictive modeling and MLOps in the Medicinal Chemistry & Drug Design department of Merck Healthcare KGaA.

