Steve Kay, the new president of The Scripps Research Institute, has big plans for the venerable biomedical research institution. Alongside incoming CEO Peter Shultz, he hopes to extend the institute’s mission beyond basic science to incorporate more translational work, in a complete bench-to-bedside approach. “If you can couple the strength in basic sciences of an institute like Scripps with real pipeline capability to make drug candidates, then you could make a really unique institute that is centred around therapeutics for unmet medical needs”, he says.
The principal way in which this transformation will be accomplished is through close cooperation with the California Institute for Biomedical Research (Calibr), an independent drug discovery institute of which Shultz is the director. Kay says he and Shultz want to “align, anneal, and eventually merge” the two institutes to create one with complete pipeline capabilities from basic discovery research to early-stage clinical work. “We want to join the drug discovery capability of Calibr with the brain trust at Scripps”, says Kay. Read more in The Lancet.