Academics and academic institutions need to pull together, to help generate more novel medicines for patients
Chas Bountra,
Professor/Chief Scientist,
University of Oxford
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, disease 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 and enhance dissemination into the best disease labs across the world
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.
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