By Kamini Magon (Senior Scientist II, Biology)
A busy 24 hrs in Edinburgh for ELRIG’s Scottish forum, which this year, focussed on women’s health in drug discovery! This was the perfect event for me, combining my drug discovery expertise with a topic I am personally interested in. The angles and insights the speakers covered were broad and varied, and it gave me loads to think about. Some of my key takeaways:
Talk 1: Diana Torgersen – Around 1/3 of drugs are pulled from the market due to toxicity in women, so this means everyone misses out. If we can understand what drives this, we can start to change how we develop drugs to work around this. However, this requires showing funders that this is a worthwhile investment! We need to convince and engage with stakeholders across the drug discovery pipeline to drive the change; from the scientists to the clinical trial teams, to the funders. By better understanding women’s basic biology and working with it, we get better drug discovery for everyone!
Talk 2: Natasha Karp – We need to make drug discovery research equitable. We often use use male cell lines, male mice, and male clinical trial participants. But what about when we’re studying conditions which disproportionately affect women? We need to not shy away from including both male and female populations in our research out of fear for increased data complexity or noise. Instead of pooling male and female participant data, we should separate the analyses out. We can then either see the same trends between both populations (great!) OR we can see differences and have the foundations to explore this further (also great!)
Talk 3: Martin Lange – Over 1 BILLION people assigned female at birth use contraceptives and nearly all of them are hormone-based. Nuvisan are working to develop next-gen, non-hormonal contraceptives – same outcome of preventing unwanted pregnancy, but with none of the side effects! Whilst the science was fascinating, I initially sat there and though “Great - yet another contraceptive which relied on the woman taking it”. But Martin pointed out that their funding comes from the Gates Foundation, and their aim is to empower those in low- and middle-income countries to take control of their bodies. I welcomed this perspective with open arms, and I can’t wait to see where the work goes!
Talk 4: Philippa Saunders – Whilst understanding of endometriosis is growing, treatment options remain very limited. Professor Saunders and her team work on investigating mechanisms involved in endometriosis, taking these, and seeing if there are already drugs which target these for therapeutic benefit. She also spoke on the link between endometriosis and other inflammatory and pain conditions; we need to start thinking about how endometriosis affects the whole body and not just see it as a pelvic disease.
Overall, one message was shared between the talks: DO BETTER BIOLOGY. When we nail the fundamentals, the drug discovery pipeline will be smoother and more successful for everyone. I return from the conference inspired, and I can’t wait to share my learnings with the Domainex team so we can do better drug discovery for everyone.