Abstract

The discovery of new medicines is too risky, too slow and too costly. There is massive duplication and wastage in biomedical research, there are questions being raised about the reproducibility of published work, and for many increasingly important therapeutic areas we are simply not producing what society and patients want. In my lecture I will discuss, how we are trying to address these challenges.
The validation of pioneer targets for drug discovery, remains a major challenge. We are therefore:
- working with a large number of pharmaceutical companies, to develop high quality small molecule inhibitors, using structure based drug design
- focussing only on novel targets, or those deemed to be ‘difficult’ or intractable, and
- giving these inhibitors to a large and growing international network of academic collaborators, to crowd source new biology, disease understanding and ‘target discovery’
These inhibitors have already facilitated proprietary efforts in pharma, catalysed the creation of new biotechs, and accelerated numerous clinical studies.
We are now building platforms of primary human cells, for screening novel inhibitors, in order to identify new ‘better’ targets for drug discovery.