AstraZeneca’s Functional Genomics Group’s primary goal is to discover new targets, primarily through the identification of new targets. But in addition to that, you can also influence your project in many other ways by elucidating target mechanisms of action, considering new combination strategies, new armor strategies, hit characterization, and validating targets that come out of various other screens.
Our main challenge is to find new targets for diseases, and I think this is a challenge that applies to drug discovery as a whole. Novelty is obviously important to us. In terms of how to do that, it’s a technical challenge to look for more complex models and apply more complex disease models to projects. Second, how to deploy the technology to understand how functional genomics screens are applied to disease, and how to combine data from across those modalities, is also very difficult.
Applying more human-relevant models is having a major impact on how projects are driven in terms of validating targets found from higher throughput screens. This has allowed us to understand very quickly which targets to prioritize and which have the most desirable effects within human-relevant and, importantly, disease-relevant models.
So we couldn’t go through this interview without mentioning AI. So it’s having a big impact on our work in terms of how we interpret the data and how we integrate the data from the screens with the data coming from our work across AstraZeneca and across the AstraZeneca Group. So we’re working very closely with genomics centers and related disease areas to bring clinical data into our analysis, and AI helps us integrate that and understand what the data is telling us.
My main role at AstraZeneca is within the Functional Genomics group, but what I love about working there is being able to develop outside of that role. One of my real passions is to drive innovative science and provide opportunities for great ideas to be funded, tested, applied and hopefully have an impact.
