Genomics Star Moves to MaRS

Dr. Aled Edwards, Director and CEO of the Structural Genomics Consortium, will relocate this summer to 16,000 sq. ft. of newly renovated lab space at MaRS within the Ontario Institute for Cancer Research (OICR), providing the capacity needed to advance a formidable research enterprise.

Driven by $30 million in annual research funding from governments, a range of pharmaceutical companies as well as the venerable Wellcome Trust — and with nodes at the University of Oxford and the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm as well as Toronto – the Structural Genomics Consortium is a public-private partnership that aims to determine the precise 3D structure of proteins important in human disease and place the information into the public domain immediately.

Understanding these complex structures, which are the products that the human genome codes for, can play important roles in the development of a new drug – as a drug’s molecular structure must allow it to dock “exquisitely” with a human protein in order to do its biological job.

“It’s quite amazing the poor understanding we have of human biology and pharmacology,” Edwards, 45, told a crowd of about 200 at a recent OICR lecture at MaRS. “But this is where the solution lies: understanding human biology and pharmacology, predicting toxicology results before a drug fails, finding better models of human disease and identifying useful biomarkers to guide clinical trials.”

Edwards approaches this mission with nothing short of zeal. He believes the science of drug discovery needs to prioritize, to focus on “grand challenges” where problems are common to a range of drugs and disorders and where economic potential is widespread.

The consortium itself is organized like a company but within an academic setting, combining industrial focus with academic freedom. Protein structures are made public quickly and are freely available in an open-access format online; it’s only later they are crafted into publications that can be found in leading journals such as Nature and Proceedings of the National Academies of Science.

Edwards’ idea is that open-access collaboration is a method to “de-risk” drug development by mobilizing the best brains worldwide to analyze data; in his view, the proprietary stage comes into play only once a drug goes into clinical trials.

And Edwards pulls no punches about the future. “Demographics and economics will mean the end of our current inefficient and costly approach in this field because unlike all other sectors, drug discovery has decreased in productivity over the last three decades,” Edwards said.

“Perhaps in as little as ten years from now we’ll be doing our drug design in silico. We’ll be able to predict who’s going to get ill, who’s going to respond to a particular drug and we’ll be able to educate society more fully on the risks and benefits of treatments.”

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