Faculty Feature: Dr. Peter Meinke

For this newsletter’s Faculty Feature, Michael Retchin (incoming SVG co-president), Shakarr Wiggins (incoming SVG Co-chair of Outreach) and I had the opportunity recently to sit down with Dr. Peter Meinke, the Sanders Director of the Tri-Institutional Therapeutics Discovery Institute (TDI). Dr. Meinke is the co-inventor of more than 35 patents, and in 2017, he received the ACS Heroes of Chemistry for his work on elbasvir, a therapeutic that treats chronic hepatitis C in adults.  After working for over 25 years in the industry at Merck, Dr. Meinke brought his expertise in the complex process of drug discovery to the Tri-I TDI. 

SVG: Can you explain how Tri-I TDI aids in the development of new therapeutics?

Meinke: We are essentially a drug accelerator, a not-for-profit embedded in our campus here. We really function as an accelerator that prevents medicines from hitting walls. We get the data necessary to enable new medicines, which is not a simple process! And we do so by partnering with researchers across the three institutions. This includes those who are doing the foundational basic research; academic scientists typically don't have the time, the resources, or the expertise to translate their breakthroughs into therapeutics. A lot of innovative ideas die on the vine because there's nobody to take them far enough along to see where there is a future.

SVG: What motivated this approach?

Meinke: Consider the traditional biotech hubs: Boston, San Francisco, San Diego, and so forth. The academic institutions in New York City are equally strong as any of those, yet we've never managed to create a biotech sector the same way. It has nothing to do with the quality of the science — it's actually tragic because our faculty publishes top tier papers, but then any company that's created is often moving out of the state to one of these places I mentioned.

That's what actually led to the creation of TDI. We're a not-for-profit. We are wholly owned by the three institutions and funded by philanthropy as well. We are therapeutic-area agnostic and modality-independent. So, if you have a clever idea about [tuberculosis], malaria, or some rare orphan disease for which there's an unmet need, and you have an innovative observation? We'll work on it. Yes, we mostly work on cancer for obvious reasons. But unlike pharma, we don't worry about the size of the market. We worry about the unmet need.

SVG: How does TDI prepare for therapeutics to be eventually spun into successful companies?

Meinke: At the end of the day, if we are successful, what we do is we write a "graduation document." During my 28 years at Merck, we would create what was called a preclinical package. This was the base document that started the ball rolling, to move to IND-enabling studies. When we complete this project, we've shown that their ideas are correct, it works in an animal model, and it has a reasonably safe profile. This becomes the base document that they're going to use to get investors to fund it.

SVG: How do you work with large pharmaceutical companies to get projects to the finish line?

Meinke: All large pharma recognize that they cannot innovate their way to a vibrant future, by themselves. Often at least half of their pipelines come from academic scientist collaborations. This helps pay for a significant part of TDI's bills for a program if it's in their sphere of interest to be licensed, but it has to be at competitive rates.

SVG: How does TDI fit into the larger biotech community and ecosystem?

Meinke: Our aim is to encourage our scientists to do the things that they do so well, and to give them the resources and the power that they need to take that insight and convert it into a therapeutic. We do this by leveraging everything that exists in our community, our talented scientists and young students. This is truly unique. There's nothing like this anywhere in the United States, and so it really is a unique bench to bedside construct that exists in your backyard. One thing that makes us really powerful is all TDI staff, all the intellectual property is owned by the institution and the originating faculty, not TDI, even though TDI scientists are often extensively represented on patents. What it means is that a scientist can come talk to me about anything she's doing with no risk to her program or any IP that might come out, because all I can do is help her be successful.