Have you ever wondered what
kind of science goes into discovering and developing a new medicine?
Well, now's your chance to find out.
Come with me on an all-access tour of AstraZeneca’s
new Discovery Centre in Cambridge.
And find out what science can do.
This is AstraZeneca’s brand new Discovery Centre in Cambridge.
The people who work here are turning bright ideas into
life-changing medicines.
They no longer want to just treat, but cure patients
developing cutting-edge therapies that address the causes
of health conditions that affect millions of people around the world.
From cancer to respiratory disease, heart failure
to chronic kidney disease.
Where better to start than at the beginning.
Searching for the clues that will lead to potential new treatments.
Can you explain to me the challenge and why do we need to develop new medicines?
Why do we need to do better?
A lot of the medicines we developed today are actually aiming
to treat the symptoms rather than the underlying causal biology.
Human genetics has great impact in terms of both identifying
what's the root cause of human disease, but also in terms of understanding
the full range of human diseases that could benefit from our medicines.
How do we figure out that that's actually what we think we're looking for
and that these genes are doing what we think they're doing in disease?
So at AstraZeneca, we used an approach called functional genomics,
and this is essentially a technology that enables us to assess the function
of a given gene and ask the question; What is the effect on the cell?
It all adds up to a huge amount of data from a range of sources.
And that's more information than our human brains are capable of analysing.
One of the challenges we have as human beings is to spot patterns
when we have a lot of different data to work through,
and that's exactly where AI and data science comes to the forefront.
It can sift through all of these huge amounts of data
to find the patterns sort of a needle in a haystack.
Once we’ve found potential targets that are relevant in a particular disease,
we need to develop treatments
that hit them.
As well as addressing symptoms for patients.
We want to move forward to really getting
to disease modification and in the future, cure.
Previously, it's been difficult to prosecute every target
that the biology leads us to because we only had access to small
molecule therapies and large molecule monoclonal antibody therapies.
We now have access to multimodality therapies.
And we're looking about new ways in which to treat cancer.
And these involve living medicines.
And really, what we're doing is we're using natural processes to control cancer,
and we now know immunity plays a big role in preventing the emergence of cancer
and taking that and evolving it to the next step.
So reprograming and re-engineering immunity
so that you can rebuild a patient's immune system so that it can effectively,
seek out, destroy and eliminate those malignant cells.
That's the critical part that we're living in. It's so exciting.
We want to use, for example, CRISPR based therapies to edit T cells
so that we can use T cell therapies in our patients with autoimmune diseases
and really get to a place where we're inducing remission.
And maybe in the future cure.
One challenge when working with these innovative types
of potential treatments is getting them into the right place
in the body so they can get to work where they're needed.
So as we have advanced our understanding of disease,
we have also advanced the complexity
of the molecules that we need to treat them with.
And these have really changed in terms of their size and properties
and also how fragile they are, if you think about nucleic acids.
So drug delivery is where we use nanotechnology
to encapsulate these molecules and have them enter into the cell
and not just into the cell, but also into the right part of the cells
if it is the cytoplasm, as in the case of M RNA or the nucleus for DNA.
It's not enough to find new targets
and have the right chemistry to design new treatments.
We need to know they work.
When you think about any disease model, there's multiple cell types.
It has a 3D architecture.
All of these things are important to model the biology.
So by having a more complex model like an organoid or a tissue slice,
it helps us model biology in a more accurate way.
Tell me about these organoids.
What are they and what do they allow us to do
and to see about the biology of disease?
We have here some models of 3D human organoids, they're from the human lungs,
from healthy humans and COPD patients.
We use them to model the airway remodeling and mucus secretion.
So the similarity between the organoids and the human patients using these models,
we know that we can find better targets and treatments for patients.
Another important part of understanding what's happening
deep down inside our cells and tissues is imaging.
So most people understand that we use a microscope.
This is a very traditional technology been around for hundreds of years.
It lets our pathologists and our scientists really investigate the morphology
and events happening in a tissue.
We can supercharge it by using advanced AI on image analysis, which really sees
patterns and relationships in the tissue, that we as people couldn’t see.
But in AstraZeneca, what's really exciting is we've invested in technologies
like mass spec imaging, so these are brand new approaches
to instead of rely on the view of the tissue, explode it apart and detect
every single molecule, collect all that information and then reinterrogate that
using other advanced imaging methods.
This is really changing
the way we can think about how a disease progresses,
but also the safety and efficacy of our medicines.
This incredible new Discovery Centre brings together
amazing scientists and future technologies.
The innovative medicines they're developing here have real potential to change lives.
But no one can do it alone,
something AstraZeneca have known for more than a decade.
No science is done alone, it's in collaboration,
and this is a great place to meet your colleagues.
The design of the building, the outside space, is just really exciting.
Just being here in this ecosystem, you know,
it’s one of the most liveliest ecosystems there are in the whole of Europe.
What I'm most excited about
is really getting everybody together across disciplines under one roof.
And I think that's really how you foster sort of scientific advancement.
And it's through that collaborative effort
across the Cambridge community and elsewhere
that we’ll really be able to succeed in our mission.
The power of collaboration working together across the life sciences
to make a real difference to health care and society.