Target Discovery and Functional Validation

The Target Discovery Team, led by Dr Erica Bello focuses on the optimisation of complex cellular or patient-derived disease models, and through their application, the identification of clinically relevant, high confidence targets for disease therapy. The team combine academic discovery with industry rigour, defining end-goal criteria and building go/no go decision-making points into all projects. Working in collaboration with academics and clinicians in Cambridge who have expertise in specific disease areas and who have developed biologically relevant cell-based models, the team strive to lower the barriers associated with adoption of these complex disease models into drug discovery workflows. The team focus on establishing robust models and screening outputs that will generate commercial interest and meet end-user needs (for example as a partner of choice in the NC3Rs Technologies-to-Tools programme). Many projects involve collaboration with the Computational Research team to interpret and interrogate datasets, and apply an AI and machine learning methodology into their target discovery approach.