itemprop=description content=We spoke to Professor Janet Hemingway, founding Director of iiCON and Professor of Tropical Medicine at Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine.
Interview conducted by Lily Ramsey, LLMOct 9 2023 Insights From IndustryProf Janet HemingwayFounding Director of iiCON and Professor of Tropical Medicine at LSTMEnter text here In this interview conducted in anticipation of ELRIG UK's Drug Discovery 2023 Conference, we spoke to Professor Janet Hemingway, founding Director of iiCON and Professor of Tropical Medicine at Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine.
We don't do phase two testing, but once you get a little bit further down the track and are aiming to put products onto the market, we've got some large-scale randomized control trials that we're doing in a very different format. These trials reduce the cost of getting products into market and positively impact the products once they get there.
We are looking at developing state-of-the-art organoids where the organoids are talking to each other immunologically to get a real handle on whether the molecules we're bringing through the program will work in human tissues early in the process. Then, we've got a couple of new exciting developments within iiCON.
As the Founding Director of the Infection Innovation Consortium , could you elaborate on how collaborations between academia, industry, and clinical partners can accelerate the discovery and supply of anti-infective treatments? I think collaboration is essential. If you look at the infectious disease landscape, you realize very quickly that it's been an area that has been under-invested for a very long time by the industry because the profit margins haven't been there.
We've got four products entering phase one clinical trials already, and we've got three huge randomized control trials operating, one of which has already done its interim reporting. On the back of that, we've already changed the WHA policy over how those products should be used globally. So we're working very hard at the moment to see how we can reduce that cost, how we can broker partnerships, how we can look at new funding mechanisms to actually start and pull some of these things through because we can't afford to lose things at that stage given the need that is out there globally for some of these molecules coming through.
Events like Drug Discovery help researchers break communication and collaboration challenges, especially since the pandemic. I think it's bringing people together and getting people talking together. We all lived through COVID. We were very busy and were beavering away in the labs over that period, but we spent much time looking at our computers and talking with people we largely knew on teams meetings.
So I think it's rapidly moving at the moment. By actually getting different constituencies together, we can start and feed off each other and see how we make the best of these new modalities as we go forward. But also, we're looking at a global need here. So we're part of a UK network and a broader global network that is moving these activities forward that's really exciting. It's great to be part of an industry that is changing and diversifying quickly.
We had a five-year grant from UKRI to get it moving, but I see this as a long-term consortium that will be there not just for five years but for the foreseeable future. So I need to make sure I've got that sustainability in place. Then we set up a small company and a spin-out from that, looking at getting new diagnostics to market with some new technology that I think will be game-changing.
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