Julian Dopstadt
Director Eli Lilly
Dr. Julian Dopstadt is Director of ADME at Eli Lilly and Company, where he supports drug discovery and development across all disease areas and modalities. With over 8 years of experience in the field at leading pharma companies in Europe and the US, he brings deep expertise in biotransformation and covalent drug discovery & development. Julian proposed, initiated, and chaired the IQ Consortium Working Group on Targeted Covalent Inhibitors, reflecting his commitment to advancing industry-wide best practices.
Seminars
Thursday 22nd October 2026
Translating Covalent Drug Candidates from Concept to Clinic: DMPK & Clinical Pharmacology Strategies for Patient Benefit
2:30 pm
- Defining the critical DMPK and clinical pharmacology considerations needed to successfully translate covalent drug candidates from discovery into clinical development – spanning dose selection, regimen design, clearance prediction, and the exposure-response relationships unique to irreversible mechanisms
- Leveraging cross-industry insights from a multi-company consortium to identify common challenges and best practices in progressing covalent therapies, with a focus on overcoming bottlenecks in dose finding, safety assessment, warhead reactivity characterization, and clinical study design
- Establishing practical guidance for bridging preclinical and clinical decision-making – including the implications of endogenous protein binding, which studies are essential vs. avoidable, and how to optimize development strategy to maximize the likelihood of regulatory success and patient impact
Wednesday 21st October 2026
Fireside Chat: Interpreting Preclinical Safety Data to Support First in Human & Early Clinical Decisions for Covalent Drugs
4:30 pm
- How are different organizations assessing covalent safety risk prior to first in human studies, and how are these assessments informing starting dose and escalation strategy?
- How reliably do preclinical toxicity and target engagement signals translate across species for covalent drugs, and where do current models consistently fail to predict clinical outcomes?
- What practical criteria are teams using today to progress covalent candidates into the clinic in the absence of definitive, predictive safety models?
