NEVER STOP INNOVATING

CLOSE TO 50% of Emory start-ups discover and develop new drugs

62 Number of pharmaceutical start-ups

25 Number of FDA-approved drugs have to keep an eye on how we can best commercialize things.”

Pulmonologist Louise Hecker left the University of Arizona to join Emory as an associate professor of medicine in 2020 in part because she believed Emory understood the role of private enterprise.

“They brought me here to be an academic entrepreneur,” she says. “To translate any science into something that helps people, you have to think of it as a product. I felt like this was a place where that mindset is valued. Even the dean has a company. You don’t see that everywhere.”

Hecker studies regenerative biology and the body’s declining ability to heal scar tissue as it ages. In a major discovery, she identified NOX4, an oxidizing agent that can go into overdrive and result in fatal organ damage after traumas like a heart attack. She set her sights on finding a compound that would curb NOX4 and allow organs to regenerate themselves.

She and her lab screened thirty-five thousand compounds to find candidates that looked likely to control

NOX4. It was a long, difficult search that took years and was filled with disappointment.

“Things fail all the time,” Hecker explains. “It’s a key part of being successful. I always try to fail as quickly as I can, because you’re not going to find out what works until you find out what doesn’t work. Each failure brings you a step closer to success.”

Now that she is ramping up her lab at Emory, she hopes to be filing “a lot” of invention disclosures in the coming years as new applications for her research are discovered.

In continuing her work on a new campus, Hecker is inspired by pioneer Emory drug hunters such as Dennis Liotta, whom she asked to be on her academic advisory board.

“To have people like Dennis around is fantastic,” Hecker says. “I mean, he’s done it.” When it comes to drug discovery, history seems to be repeating itself at Emory.