Jan Kulagowski

"I work as a drug discovery manager at Parkinson’s UK, where I identify appropriate projects to fund and support. I see the frustrations of people with Parkinson’s in that they don’t have medicines to help them in a meaningful way. My driver is to be able to do good science, with a tangible outcome for these patients.

One of the projects we fund is spin-out company Keapstone Therapeutics. Dr Richard Mead (University of Sheffield) and his team aim to deliver potential new treatments for Parkinson’s. Their compounds and associated data package, which was developed together with the European Lead Factory, were particularly attractive to us. In order for our projects to be attractive for further development by big pharma companies, we work to industrial standards. These standards are much more stringent than academic ones, because pharma companies need confidence that a project will eventually reach fruition. ELF plays an important role in this. Firstly because the European Lead Factory educates academics in why industry-quality data is required and secondly because ELF helps them to produce these data.

The hit compounds in Richard Mead’s data package were validated to a degree you would expect to see in industry. This gave us confidence to fund the project for an initial 16-month period with a budget of 1.3 M GPB (1.5M€). Based on the positive results so far, it is likely that we will continue funding this project beyond the first term.

When potential collaborators do not yet have the appropriate starting points, ELF would definitely be an organisation we would direct them to. It is a proven opportunity and asset, with many examples of how it has been successful."