Dr Dahlia Doughty Shenton

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Innovation Project

In 2018, while working as the lead scientist of the Edinburgh Phenotypic Assay Centre lab, Dahlia collaborated with Professor Julien Michel to validate cyclophilin-binding compounds that his lab had designed and synthesised by testing their impact on disease progression compared to the prototypical cyclophilin-targeting compound cyclosporin A.

After securing an ISSF award in 2019 Dahlia has worked on the validation of this family of trivector cyclophilin engagers (TCEs) as a rich source of drug candidates for conditions where cyclophilins are known to be key players of disease regression.

Dahlia is going to lead the delivery of her discovery in cyclophilin targeting and modulation into a full-fledged translational, pre-clinical research project at the Institute for Regeneration and Repair.

Dahlia hopes to launch a spin-out company centred around the development of the TCEs as antiviral agents, immunomodulators and neuroprotective agents.

Interview Transcript

Ian Hatch: Hi, Dahlia. It's lovely to meet you today. My name's Ian Hatch. I'm the Head of Business Development at Edinburgh Innovations.

Dahlia Doughty Shenton: Thank you very much. I'm very excited to be here, and really excited to be part of the first cohort of Innovation Fellows here at Edinburgh Innovations.

Ian: Excellent. So, Dahlia, what drew you to the role of the Innovation Fellow?

Dahlia: I've always enjoyed translational research, and I felt that the Innovation Fellowship was a really amazing opportunity for my translational research to be fully supported here in academia. What drew me to the role is the fact that it is the complete package.

I know that with the Innovation Fellowship, my translational research will be supported, not only through mentorship, but also translational research training opportunities, seed funding, and all-important guidance in how to take my research forward into true impact.

Ian: To follow on from that, I'd like to ask a question about your career to date at Edinburgh, and you mentioned translational research is something that you've had throughout your career. How have you been able to define your career through translational research, and what benefits do you think it gives you in terms of your career satisfaction?

Dahlia: My PhD project was actually a high-throughput screen. So, I would say from the time that I was doing my PhD, I was maybe primed to think of my research in a translational way. Once I came to the University of Edinburgh, I carried out another high-throughput screen. I then had the opportunity to work as part of a strategic collaboration with a pharmaceutical company, Galapagos NV, evaluating some of their preclinical candidates in assays that we developed here at the University of Edinburgh.

I then had the opportunity to also go on and work with Professor Neil Carragher, establishing his Edinburgh Phenotypic Assay Centre at the BioQuarter Campus, where we then collaborated with multiple researchers across the University of Edinburgh, helping to take their research to a more translational focus by developing screenable assays from their research.

So, I would say that the University of Edinburgh has given me amazing opportunities to continue my enthusiasm for doing translational research and put my translational research into practice and see genuine outcomes from it.

Ian: Can you tell us a little bit about your innovation under your Fellowship?

Dahlia: So, my innovation is hopefully a new therapeutic to treat triple-negative breast cancer. I'm hoping that I will be able to show over the next few years that these new compounds treat triple-negative breast cancer in another fashion. And I am aiming to take this through all the way to a preclinical trial application.

Ian: What's your innovation journey been so far, and have you used any major funding sources?

Dahlia: So, here at the University of Edinburgh, I've benefited greatly from several funding sources that are managed by Edinburgh Innovations. As I said, this project grew out of an initial interdisciplinary collaboration out of the School of Chemistry and started off as a side project. In order to take that project forward, I was able to harness funding from the ISSF fund, which gave me the opportunity to pursue ideas that I had about how these chemicals might be useful for treating cancer.

Further to that, I was then able to access harmonised IAE funding, which will now allow me to take this project even further to develop it into some further pre-clinical studies, which I hope will support clinical trial applications at the end of the next two years.

I've been able to access really key training that has helped me in my translational journey. So, I've benefited from drug discovery training, I've benefited from translational project management training, I've benefited from research commercialisation and impact training. And all of these, I think, together, along with the seed funding pots of money that I was able to access, led into me developing this project into where it is now, where I could use it as the basis for my Innovation Fellow application. And where I think having now been able to successfully acquire the Innovation Fellowship, I will hopefully be able to take this forward into an application for a clinical trial.

Ian: How did you hear about the funding that was available, the training courses that you've gone on, and also the Innovation Fellowship itself? Where do you get your information from?

Dahlia: Paying attention to emails. Edinburgh Innovations has been really great about sending out emails and newsletters, advertising opportunities that they've sourced. And I think that, as researchers, we have so much going on that sometimes you bypass these emails, or you see the email, and you think, "That'll be interesting," but I'll come back to it in a bit. I think it's really key to not wait until the very end of your postdoc before you start accessing this type of training.

In addition, I would say, don't be afraid. All of those emails often have, ‘If you have any questions, contact so-and-so’ or ‘Send an email to so-and-so’. I would say don't be afraid to do that, because that has been really useful to me as well. I've been able to have conversations with people at Edinburgh Innovations where I've said, “You know, I'm thinking about this idea, and I'm not quite sure whether it would fit this type of funding application, or whether this idea is commercially viable”. And the staff at Edinburgh Innovations, they've always been so happy to sit down and have a conversation with me, whether it’s on Teams, whether it’s a coffee, in the Niche café, or something like that. And I can just use them as a sounding board, and that has been extremely useful to me.

Ian: Okay, pay attention to the emails. I'll take some of that myself.

Dahlia: It's hard, but...

Ian: And what's next for your innovation?

Dahlia: So, as I mentioned, over the next two years, I hope to do some key experiments in the lab that I hope will show that these compounds will be very useful for the treatment of triple-negative breast cancer, and show that they can be taken into clinical trials. So, at the end of the next two years, I hope to put together a clinical trial application.

I'll also be looking for collaborations with commercial entities to help fund this research, to take this research forward to that stage.

Ian: What would you say is the most important thing that you hope to achieve from this Innovation Fellowship?

Dahlia: From this Innovation Fellowship, I hope that this research will lead to a new drug to treat triple-negative breast cancer and perhaps other cancers, and thus will give people who are diagnosed with cancer further options for their treatment that will give them more time, because that's what we all want.

Ian: So, Dahlia, I really wanted to thank you for your time today and coming and speaking to us. I really do think it's an inspirational journey that you've had, and it's something that you are a role model for other people in your area of science, and something we really want to develop and wish you all the best for this Innovation Fellow. And any other support we can give you, we're always at your doorstep.

Dahlia: Thank you so much. As I said, I'm really excited about this opportunity that the Innovation Fellowship has offered me, and you will be hearing from me. I will be continuing to access those training opportunities, that guidance, those discussions with Edinburgh Innovations staff, and I really look forward to continuing to work with Edinburgh Innovations as I continue on this amazing Translational journey.

Ian: It's a pleasure. Thank you.

Research Experience

• Senior Postdoctoral Research Fellow - University of Edinburgh, Centre for Reproductive Health, Institute for Regeneration and Repair
• Postdoctoral Research Fellow - University of Edinburgh, Cancer Research UK Edinburgh Centre, Institute of Genetics and Cancer
• Graduate Research Assistant and PhD Candidate - Duke University, Department of Biochemistry
• Research Technologist - Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital
• Research Assistant - Brown University, Department of Biology and Medicine
• Summer Research Intern – Syngenta, Department of Transformation Technology
• Undergraduate Research Assistant – University of Richmond, Department of Chemistry