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ELF testimonial: Andy McElroy
Andy McElroy is the founder and CEO of The Research Network (TRN), an associate network of specialists focused on enabling drug discovery and development. A chemist by training with various roles in drug discovery, Andy has run several screening programmes with the European Lead Factory (ELF). He spoke to us about his experience of working with ELF and the importance of investing in early drug discovery initiatives like the ELF.
What has been your experience of working with the ELF?
We’ve been involved with the ELF from the start and overall, our experience has been very positive. We’ve been impressed by the professionalism and expertise of the screening and chemistry teams. The chemistry team in particular strikes the right balance in terms of constructive feedback. We’ve also had helpful and efficient support from the programme office team at Lygature, following up on opportunities for us to seek out funding. All of the back-end support has been very professionally handled.
We’ve progressed six projects and have been successful in identifying novel leads for a few of them. We’ve been fortunate to have a pretty reasonable High Throughput Screening success rate.
We did struggle with a couple of targets early on in the first phase of the ELF, particularly in terms of materials supply, which slowed down the progress.
What has been the added value to your work of connecting with the ELF?
The collaboration with the European Lead Factory has been extremely enabling. It has allowed us to reach the step of having a funded project that’s moving towards a new drug development candidate.
Two of our screens were successful, one of which produced truly brilliant chemistry matter – they’re like drug candidates in their own right! We’ve also made some major discoveries in terms of the nature of our targets, which makes the work even more interesting and investable. We are currently in discussion with early grant and investor groups about this.
What is it that makes the ELF compound library so attractive?
The compounds are of good quality and are administered and handled in a professional way. All of this adds up to it having a level of pedigree that makes it very attractive. It perhaps could have been a bit more diverse, but it does offer a perfectly sufficient range of chemistries.
Why should funders invest in early drug discovery?
I think the hit discovery space is majorly underfunded. There’s a gap in the overall drug discovery engine with funding tending towards later-stage rather than early-stage projects. More investment in this space could unblock the drug discovery pipeline, providing more opportunities throughout – from the idea phase right up to actual treatment development.
Early drug discovery is a tough field, but the ELF is brilliant in offering some much-needed opportunities. Very few applied science projects that seed new research receive EU funding. The ELF is one of the few – taking knowledge and applying it at the very start of the drug discovery journey. This alone makes it rather unique. We need more funded initiatives like the ELF that do this early-phase applied work. If we could have such a project for every disease area that would be the ideal situation!
Should the ELF continue past this last IMI-funding term that comes to an end in November this year, what features would you suggest including?
Another way of identifying leads for targets that’s very powerful is DNA-encoded screening. It would be very enabling to life sciences in Europe if we could pull together an ELF-type of initiative for DNA-encoded screening. This could be a nice way for the ELF to diversify and grow. There’s certainly a gap in the market for this in Europe and investing in these next-generation screening technologies and infrastructures would be extremely valuable for the life sciences sector in the EU.