The validation of pioneer targets for drug discovery, remains a major challenge. In my lecture I will describe how we:
- work with a large number of pharmaceutical companies, to develop high quality, freely available, small molecule inhibitors
- focus only on novel targets, or those deemed to be ‘difficult’ or intractable
- give these inhibitors to a large and growing international network of academic collaborators, to crowd source new biology, disease understanding and ‘target discovery’
- have facilitated proprietary efforts in pharma, and catalysed the creation of new biotechs, and
- have accelerated numerous clinical studies
We are now
- generating ‘Target Enabling Packages’ (comprising purified protein, biophysical or biochemical assays to assess function, the three dimensional X ray structure and chemical starting points) for novel, high priority, cancer linked genes
- building platforms of primary human cells, for screening novel inhibitors, in order to identify new ‘better’ targets for drug discovery
- building major collaborations with patient groups and hospitals, in order to catalyse these studies
Together, we are creating a new ecosystem for drug discovery. One which we believe will accelerate the generation of more novel medicines, more quickly. We hope these will also be more affordable.