Closing remarks

This year has been one of great change for me, taking over as interim Head of the DDU when Paul Wyatt left in March and at the beginning of October, taking over permanently. I feel very excited by this challenge and grateful for the support of my colleagues across the whole DDU and more widely from WCAIR and the Division of Biological Chemistry and Drug Discovery and the University as a whole. We are fortunate to have a great team working in the DDU. They are achieving some really exciting and innovative science critical to carrying out drug discovery. We also have a great set of collaborators in academia, industry, product development partnerships and with funding agencies. We have a large and valued involvement in big international consortia, such as the malaria and tuberculosis drug accelerators run by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, HIT-NTD through Wellcome, as well as the IMI CARE consortium for COVID drug development and the IMI ERA4TB consortium for TB drug development.

The DDU is making great progress across a range of neglected infectious diseases, including Chagas disease, cryptosporidiosis, malaria, TB and COVID and have recently started a project in schistosomiasis. The DDU has and is continuing to build a lot of experience in this area and drug discovery for infectious diseases will continue to a large proportion of activity. Unfortunately, there is no shortage of infectious diseases which require new medicines. The Innovative Targets group continues to make exciting progress across a number of projects. The recent change in funding from the MRC Confidence in Concepts to the MRC UKRI Impact Accelerator Account will allow the Innovative Targets group to take a longer-term view and to focus into their work in particular areas and spin out more companies.

Being based in the University of Dundee gives the DDU many opportunities; to develop new methods, explore disease biology and develop new drug discovery projects. Through our base within the University we have seen some paradigm shifting technologies and approaches developed and implemented in our research, such as the Mode of Action group, mice with humanised metabolic systems and our understanding of persister biology. It is exciting to see collaborations developing within the University, for example with the Centre for Targeted Protein Degradation, the MRC Protein Phosphorylation Unit, the Division of Molecular Microbiology and the School of Medicine. I believe that there are other important collaborations that we can develop in order to bridge the gap and de-risk academic drug discovery for industry and to drive projects towards the clinic.

It is important to continue to innovate in our approaches for drug discovery, this has been a key impact of WCAIR. In collaboration with others we have delivered new work-flows in areas such as: developing physiologically relevant assays and animal models of disease; computational methods for compound optimisation; high throughput chemistry; imaging techniques; and biophysical methods for screening and assay.

I am really pleased by the training programmes that we have been implementing in synthetic and medicinal chemistry, drug metabolism and pharmacokinetic and also in leadership and management skills. We have great staff and we need to help them and support them to develop as scientists and managers. We are also very fortunate to be supported by a great team of administrators, laboratory managers and technicians, contracts managers and finance officers.

I particularly thank our collaborators and partners, in Dundee and across the world, for the great interactions that we have, which is critical for our work. Drug discovery is hugely complex and it is important to work with others in these endeavours. I also would like to thank our funding agencies, without whom none of our work would be possible.

Professor Ian Gilbert Head of the DDU