The 74th annual conference on Mass Spectrometry and Allied Topics ran June 1–5 at the San Diego Convention Center, bringing together researchers across academia, industry, and government for four days of oral sessions, poster presentations, workshops, and exhibits. The program — spanning more than 40 concurrent oral sessions per day across topics from ion mobility instrumentation to clinical analysis, environmental contaminants, and cancer immunology — offered a cross-section of where mass spectrometry currently sits and where it is heading.
For drug discovery researchers in particular, the breadth of the ASMS 2026 program reflected a field in which mass spectrometry has become central not just to analytical characterization but to the biological questions that drive discovery. The conference opened with a plenary lecture from Benjamin Cravatt of The Scripps Research Institute, titled “Protein and Ligand Discovery on a Global Scale” — a framing that set the tone for a week in which the intersection of mass spectrometry with target identification, chemoproteomics, and therapeutic characterization was a recurring thread.
Chemoproteomics and drug target identification
Monday morning’s dedicated session on chemoproteomics and protein probes brought together work from several groups applying mass spectrometry-based approaches to fundamental problems in drug discovery. Presentations included work from the University of Oxford on expediting the discovery of deubiquitinase inhibitors through activity-based proteomics, a large-scale chemoproteomic profiling study of clinical kinase inhibitors from the Technical University of Munich, and a live-cell chemoproteomic atlas of stereoselective ligand-protein interactions from Harvard Medical School.
Researchers from Talus Bioscience presented a platform for discovering covalent ligands against protein targets, while a team from Momentum Biotechnologies described a plate-format automated approach for drug target identification. The session also included work from University of California, Los Angeles using photochemical approaches to capture the state-dependent proteome.
Tuesday morning drug discovery and development session ran parallel to quantitative proteomics, metabolomics, and biomarker analysis sessions, with presentations from Pfizer on standardizing proteomics frameworks for drug discovery, from AstraZeneca on antibody-drug conjugate (ADC) pharmacokinetic assays from preclinical to clinical deployment, and from Talus Bioscience on AI-guided screening for covalent modulators. A presentation from Amgen covered proteomic profiling of Cullin-Ring ligase activity across 28 human cell lines — directly relevant to the growing field of targeted protein degradation.
AI and informatics across the week
AI and computational tools appeared throughout the ASMS 2026 program, embedded within analytical workflows rather than treated as standalone topics. The Tuesday afternoon session dedicated to AI in mass spectrometry instrumentation and applications ran alongside sessions on biotherapeutic characterization and lipidomics. Monday morning featured a full session on multiomics integration and applications, with presentations covering large language model applications for pathway analysis, probabilistic modeling frameworks for multi-omics data integration, and tools for extending gene ontology analysis to lipidomics datasets.
Wednesday morning’s informatics session covered innovations in computational mass spectrometry more broadly, while Thursday morning’s informatics session addressed metabolomics, lipidomics, and glycomics — including AI-driven lipid identification pipelines and spectrum clustering approaches for largescale molecular networks. Throughout the week, data-independent acquisition (DIA) and its associated computational requirements appeared as a recurring methodological theme, with dedicated sessions and workshops on DIA for post-translational modifications, quantitative DIA data analysis, and DIA-based phosphoproteomics.
Biotherapeutic characterization
Biopharmaceutical development was well represented across the program. Wednesday afternoon’s main hall session was dedicated to biotherapeutics, specifically proteins, antibodies, and ADCs. Tuesday afternoon included a parallel session on biotherapeutic characterization and quantitation. A Monday evening workshop focused on mass spectrometry approaches for characterizing complex biotherapeutic modalities, and a Tuesday evening workshop addressed the peptide renaissance and emerging analytical challenges for peptide-based therapeutics.
Within the biotherapeutic sessions, presentations addressed ADC pharmacokinetics, MHC-associated peptide proteomics workflows for immunogenicity assessment of monoclonal antibodies and adeno-associated viral (AAV) vectors, and longitudinal deep proteomic profiling of plasma during CAR-T therapy. A session on the detection of high-mass analytes covered charge detection mass spectrometry for AAV vector characterization throughout downstream purification — a technically demanding application with direct relevance for cell and gene therapy manufacturing.
Also featured in the exhibit hall were new instrument platform launches oriented toward biopharma applications, including platforms designed for broader dynamic range in complex samples, upgraded software for processing top-down proteomics data, and integrated workflows for oligonucleotide and mRNA therapeutic analysis.
Single-cell omics and spatial multiomics
Thursday morning’s main hall session on single-cell omics reflected the maturation of mass spectrometry-based approaches for profiling individual cells. Presentations covered single-cell proteomics using affinity reagent-aided signal amplification, top-down proteomics of single human muscle cells integrating function and proteoform identity, mapping human brain development through single-cell proteomics, and surface proteome profiling at the single-cell level for immune cell antigen discovery in inflammatory disease — the last from Genentech.
A parallel Thursday morning session on the integration of multi-omics approaches included an end-to-end spatial multiomics approach for analyzing single tissue sections from the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, a multi-omics analysis of molecular aging networks across ancestries and geographies from Stanford University, and a network-based proteomics framework for identifying multi-omic crosstalk in disease pathology.
Spatial approaches also appeared earlier in the week. Monday afternoon’s imaging session was dedicated to spatially resolved omics, and Tuesday afternoon’s biomarker session included a presentation on spatially driven lipid biomarker discovery at cellular, neighborhood, and functional tissue unit scales in human kidney from Vanderbilt University. Wednesday morning’s imaging session covered pharmaceuticals, metabolites, lipids, and glycans.
Thursday morning’s cancer and immunity session addressed mass spectrometry’s role in immuno-oncology specifically, with presentations on quantitative mapping of tumor-NK immune synapses, surfaceome profiling of acute myeloid leukemia for immunotherapy target discovery from University of California, San Francisco, and deep learning approaches for discovering host neoantigens in immunopeptidomics.
Closing on scientific integrity
The conference closed Thursday with a plenary lecture on scientific integrity from Elisabeth Bik, a microbiologist and independent scientific integrity expert whose work has contributed to more than 1,600 retractions and 1,200 corrections across the scientific literature. Her inclusion as the closing plenary speaker — in place of the scientific discovery talks that typically anchor major conference closings — represented a deliberate statement from ASMS about the responsibilities accompanying the field’s growing influence in biomedical research and drug development.
