A gap, A bit of a diversion, A change and A win

The Gap, soooo, long time no posts, again.  This time I do have a good excuse, honest I do, I changed jobs last summer, but first a small Diversion.

For the last 11 years I've worked in a small-ish company which has been trying to develop new medicines for both cancers and rare genetic diseases.  Over the last few years we've done OK on the oncology front, we launched two new drugs for genetically-defined leukeamias.

Our first, Idhifa

Our second, Tibsovo

This is great, especially as I've worked on both programs across their development.  Then things changed.  Last summer our leadership decided that we as a company should not split our focus, so they sold all of the Oncology side of the business.  Our new focus is 100% rare genetic diseases.  I was pretty happy with this as this was where most of my focus was anyway.  

The Change.  

I used to be a Research Fellow, doing computational biology across the whole rare-disease portfolio.  As part of new reorganization I was asked to pivot directions onto one of my long-standing areas of interest and take a bit of a huge step too.  I agreed, and now I'm running a lab group focusing on genetic diseases of mitochondria.  Its been a long time since I was in the lab, so I have been quite busy hiring and getting the lab set up.  The cost, very little time to play and paint, or really do much else...  ...things are stabilizing now so I'm trying to fix that.

And the Win, well last week the FDA just granted approval to our third drug, and our first rare genetic disease drug, Mitapivat (Pyrukynd), for a form of haemolytic anaemia.

This is the first approved treatment for these patients,  to say we are are all fairly pleased is a bit of an understatement  =8-)

So, with all this out of the way and the lab time evaning out, tim to get some more soldiers painted, played with and as COVID is declining (finger's crossed it stays that way), prep for this year's GZG ECC, woohoo!