Discussion

The validation of pioneer targets for drug discovery, remains a major challenge. In my lecture I will describe how we:
• continue to focus on novel targets or those deemed to be ‘difficult’ or intractable
• work with a large number of pharmaceutical companies to develop high quality, freely available inhibitors for these protein targets
• give these inhibitors to a large and growing international network of academic collaborators to crowd source new biology, disease understanding and target identification
• 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’ for novel high priority disease linked genes
• building platforms of primary human cells, for screening novel inhibitors, in order to identify new ‘better’ targets for drug discovery
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.