Invited Speaker

Emerging Trends in the Discovery and Development of Chemical Probes against Novel Therapeutic Targets in Academia: A Mount Everest in the Making
Rathnam Chaguturu
USA

Academia has historically been involved in exploring the fundamental aspects of disease targets and in developing ‘probe’ molecules to gain a better understanding of the biochemical basis of new and novel therapeutic targets. This has been particularly true in developing countries. Probe discovery has now gained unprecedented momentum in academia with the availability of vendor-supplied, diversity-based, chemical libraries, and an easy and ready access to on-campus high throughput screening (HTS) laboratories or liquid handling robotic instrumentation. Academic researchers, who long held the view that HTS is an anti-intellectual endeavor, have been experiencing a change of mind-set, and have since come to appreciate the strength of HTS in chemical probe discovery. The challenge that remains to be addressed by academia is in defining the end goal of HTS: is it just to find a ‘tool’ molecule, or is it to discover and develop a ‘drug’? What processes and collaborations have been set in place to transform a hit to a probe to a lead? With the ‘publish or perish’ dogma that is prevalent in academia, protection of intellectual property rights is a formidable task even if one finds the proverbial ‘needle in a haystack’. Technology transfer offices in academia continue to experience difficulty in licensing these molecular probes to pharma during these very early stages of medicinal chemistry explorations. A better understanding of the changing landscape at the pharma-academia interface, the role of academia in translational research and what constitutes a win-win scenario for technology transfer, is needed to strengthen opportunities for close collaboration between Pharma and Academia. The University of Kansas experience in HTS-based discovery and development of tool molecules will be discussed to highlight the strengths of molecular probe discovery in academia, and how it applies to the academia in the developing world.