In October of 2013, Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, The Rockefeller University and Weill Cornell Medical College formed the pioneering Tri-Institutional Therapeutics Discovery Institute, Inc. (Tri-I TDI) and partnered with Takeda Pharmaceutical Company, Ltd, to expedite early-stage drug discovery leads to novel therapeutics that will impact human health. The TDI is funded, in part, by a generous $15 million gift from Lewis and Ali Sanders.
The TDI is a novel organization, governed by its own Board of Directors drawn from the Leadership of the three parent institutes. Its mission is to effectively develop therapeutics that arise from discoveries made in basic science labs. Its focus is on the early stages of developing compounds that make possible all-important “proof of concept” studies – those that increase the likelihood that targeting a specific biologic pathway can favorably alter the course of a disease.
Takeda Pharmaceuticals, a global research-based pharmaceutical company with a strong record of bringing new medicines to market is a close collaborator in this effort. Takeda provides 16 highly trained medicinal chemists who work on TDI projects in close collaboration with the project PI’s and their lab members. These chemists are fully embedded in the Tri-I community and work in TDI’s labs in the Belfer Research Building. In addition to these on-site chemists, the TDI also has access to other Takeda resources, such as structural biology capabilities, ADME/tox determinations, and virtual screening services through its groups located in Shonan, Japan, San Diego, CA and Boston, MA.
At present, there are seven projects in the TDI portfolio. A Scientific Advisory Board made up of experts in biology, chemistry and drug discovery and development from academics and industry selected these from over 45 applicants. These projects span a wide swath of the therapeutic spectrum, from oncology and psychiatric disease to rare diseases. Wet chemistry work on these projects began in July of 2014 and they are making swift progress.
The Sanders Innovation and Education Initiative is a key component of the TDI. In partial fulfillment of this mission, the TDI launched the Tri-I TDI Sanders Seminar Series and hosted thought leaders in drug discovery and translational medicine, including Dr. Richard Lerner from Scripps Institute in San Diego and Dr. Joel Scherer from Lilly Chorus. To bring innovative technology to the community, the TDI negotiated a groundbreaking deal with Schrödinger, the leading provider of high quality computational chemistry and biology software. This agreement provides free access to the full capabilities of this software package to the Tri-I community for 5 years. To ensure that users in the community are fully trained on the software and have the opportunity to take full advantage of its powerful capabilities, the TDI has hosted and will continue to host a series of training events lead by applications scientists from Schrödinger.
Over the next several months, the TDI will be expanding its mission into biologics and is preparing to support the discovery and development of therapeutic antibodies. The organization is recruiting an expert industrial partner in this area and is in the process of securing lab space and leadership for this new initiative.
As the Tri-I TDI continues to grow its capabilities in new and exciting ways, it will bring transformational change to the process of developing novel therapeutics on New York’s Upper East Side.