When did you join PhoreMost, and what attracted you to the company?
I joined PhoreMost back in 2016 following my PhD at University College London, where I was studying the molecular mechanisms of TEL-AML1 leukaemia. At this point, the company was still quite small and just in the process of establishing the SITESEEKER platform. What really attracted me to PhoreMost was its vision of using these vast libraries of PROTEINi fragments to explore disease relevant phenotypes in an unbiased manner. I was very intrigued by the potential of the SITESEEKER platform to unmask new and unanticipated druggable sites and enable the discovery of targets previously considered as ‘undruggable’.
What is the role of the Biology team within Drug Discovery, and how does it fit into PhoreMost’s mission to unlock the next generation of medicines?
Using our SITESEEKER platform, the Target Discovery team identifies both novel targets and their corresponding binding pockets, providing a powerful tool to trigger our drug discovery programs. The Biology team plays a crucial role in validating these targets and identifying their mechanisms of action in disease relevant models. Furthermore, when we then generate compounds against these targets, the Biology team works closely with chemists to screen compounds as part of our screening cascade. This helps determine structure activity relationships and help progress our internal programmes.
What significant milestones have you and your team achieved so far?
As a company, we have focused on the Targeted Protein Degradation (TPD) field in recent years. To support this, our team has built a portfolio of differentiated degraders arising from the SITESEEKER platform, as well as discerning new mechanisms of degradation, and generally confirming the mechanism of action profiles across our degrader portfolios. We have expanded our team to be able to develop robust cell-based screening cascades for our novel degraders, and we are continuing to assess further POIs where novel ligase-based degraders could help to meet unmet clinical need.
How has the company evolved since you joined eight years ago?
Eight years ago, we were based at the Babraham Research Campus across one small corridor doing exciting science, keen to see where our SITESEEKER platform could take us. Since then, we have expanded to a company of nearly 50, and are even more motivated in exploring targeted degradation using novel E3 ligases – we now have an established pipeline of assets which are at various stages of the drug discovery workflow. Within the Target Discovery team, we have scaled up our processes to be able to run multiple, large phenotypic screens in parallel for not only our internal programmes, but also in collaboration with our external partners such as Roche and Boehringer Ingelheim. We have also built a suite of cellular drug discovery assays to help speed up the discovery process.
What do you enjoy most about working for PhoreMost?
The most rewarding aspect of working at PhoreMost is undoubtedly the people. Working with such a diverse set of individuals means everyone brings unique perspectives, skills and backgrounds, which makes for a motivated and collaborative environment. We have a very supportive team and I feel lucky that we get to have a lot of fun with our colleagues while doing exciting science.
Can you tell us about your involvement with PhoreMost’s employee-led committees, e.g. PhoreMind?
We have a very positive and fun work culture that we have maintained, even as we have grown as a company. Part of this can be attributed to the employee led committees we have set up. I very much enjoyed being involved in two of them – PhoreAll, which focuses on encouraging diversity and inclusion within our company, and PhoreMind, where we are committed to addressing the importance of mental health. A lot of the work we do within PhoreAll ensures that our employees get to work in an inclusive environment and they have a platform to initiate change, while PhoreMind is dedicated to ensuring that everyone at PhoreMost has access to relevant resources and channels for their mental wellbeing and to promote mental wellness strategies. Additionally, we have many other Phoremost committees, such as PhoreFun and PhoreEST, which are equally dedicated to fostering change in a positive way.