An Irish Drug Development Story
In this latest installment of “The Art Of The Start”, Darren Cunningham, CEO of Inflection Biosciences, joined us to share details of the trials and tribulations that he and his team have encountered to date in their start-up journey. Darren, who has a background in accountancy, has an impressive track record of confirming deals and managing financial strategy in the Pharma sector. He has worked in a variety of roles at world leading corporations including; Dimplex, Elan and Amarin. This talk gives an intriguing glimpse into how the “go/no-go” decisions are made on product development in the pharmaceutical industry. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the relative strength of the science is only one of a number of factors that determine the development fate of many potentially promising therapeutic treatments. Darren points out that the decision by his team to license and run with PIM kinase inhibitors as new potential therapeutics was influenced to a large extent by recent investment trends and also the stage at which these novel compounds were at, in their patent lifespan at licensing.
