Translational drug discovery
Small-Molecule Drug Discovery
Discovery biology for an industry program developing a small-molecule inhibitor for several cancer types, in partnership with an international pharmaceutical company.
Drug discovery asks a harder question of biology than a paper does. A mechanism has to be specific enough to drug, measurable enough to track, and solid enough to survive medicinal chemistry.
I work on the biology team of a drug-discovery program run with an international pharmaceutical company. The program is developing a small-molecule inhibitor for several cancer types. My part is the disease biology: designing and running the experiments that test the target and the compounds against it, and turning the results into evidence the chemistry team can act on.
The strength of the program is the interface: academic disease biology working inside an industrial development process, to the standard of evidence a compound must meet before it is worth making.