× Medicines Discovery Catapult

MDC celebrates International Day of Women and Girls in Science

To mark International Day of Women and Girls in Science, we are celebrating by highlighting some of the MDC and Lighthouse Lab women who play a vital part in making drug discovery happen. Ana-Maria Tomova – Bioscience lead Ana-Maria, who has a background in biomedical science and research, completed a PhD in Cell and Molecular […]

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Meet Hervé Barjat – Bioinformatics (Tissue Image Analysis)

Which team do you work in and what does that team do? I work in the Informatics department, and more specifically, I am part of the Bioinformatics team. We use informatic tools to gather as much information as we can about disease processes and medicines discovery. What’s your role within your team? My main focus […]

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Meet Alessandra Gaeta – Syndicate Programme Director

Which team do you work in and what does that team do? I work in the Syndicates team – we work with UK medical research charities to create disease-focussed, medicines discovery consortia, ‘Syndicates’, that address patient unmet needs, through collaboration. For example, we have worked with the Cystic Fibrosis Trust to create the Cystic Fibrosis […]

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Meet Michael Eyres – Post Doc Biomarkers

Which team do you work in and what does that team do? I work with the Biomarkers team, sat within Discovery – we look for markers of disease or treatment, treatment resistance and any other factor associated with drug discovery and clinical targets. What’s your role within your team? I initially started in January as […]

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Working in partnership to tackle antimicrobial resistance in cystic fibrosis

To mark World Antimicrobial Awareness Week, we want to highlight the work we’re doing with the Cystic Fibrosis Trust to address antimicrobial resistance (AMR) in cystic fibrosis (CF) through the CF Syndicate in AMR. The CF Syndicate in AMR drives focused, collaborative efforts to accelerate the discovery and translation to the clinic of new treatments […]

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Meet Emily Offer – Team Leader (Biomarkers)

Which team do you work in and what does that team do? I work in the Biomarkers team, within Discovery at MDC. We utilise multiple different technologies that we apply to the broad remit of projects. Typically, the project work depends on the customers and collaborators we are working with. There are a number of […]

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The challenges of accessing clinical samples

Medicines Discovery Catapult launched their sample access capability following a report that was published called ‘State of the Discovery Nation’. The report was based on a survey of UK SMEs around the various challenges in R&D which revealed that whilst access to clinical samples was important, in practice it was challenging to achieve. Importance of […]

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Biomarker identification

Why is biomarker identification so important? Clinical trials are expensive with each phase becoming more expensive as the number of subjects increases, and the attrition rate is high due to a lack of clinical efficacy. Data from the AZ pipeline have shown that programmes that have a Pharmacodynamic (PD) biomarker associated with them, where target […]

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Designing a biomarker strategy

What is a biomarker strategy and why is it important? Within the drug discovery pipeline there are several steps a compound must progress through prior to the clinical stage – initial target identification and validation, lead identification and optimisation and pre-clinical stage. Even so, drugs that enter the clinic still have a high attrition rate […]

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