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07/20/2016 08:30 AMHere’s the thing about stereotyping: it never gets the whole picture right. Say high school cheerleading captain and one image comes to mind. Say serious student of math and science and another picture takes over. But here’s the truth: both those pictures are Erin Duffy.
Erin, who lives in Deep River, is chief scientific officer of Melinta Therapeutics, a New Haven pharmaceutical company using the latest in computer technology to create new classes of antibiotics by targeting the bacterial ribosomes that create infection. Ribosomes are the factories in cells that create new genetic material necessary for life. A sophisticated technique called X-ray crystallography can create exact pictures of the bacterial ribosomes, making it possible to determine what chemical agents can bind successfully to them and effectively shut them down, killing the bacteria in the process. Melinta uses computer-aided design to optimize these chemical agents to treat current or emerging superbugs.
One of Melinta’s three founders, Yale professor of Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry Thomas Steitz, a Branford resident, shared a Nobel Prize in 2009 for his studies on the structure of ribosomes. The two other scientific founders of Melinta are also Yale chemistry professors, one Erin’s husband William Jorgensen and the other emeritus professor Peter B. Moore. The name Melinta comes from the major financial backer of the company, Michael Jaharis, born on the Greek island of Lesbos. He has named companies with which he is involved for places in Greece that remind him of home, among them Melinta.
The very success of antibiotics in fighting disease, Erin points out, has made research to develop new ones necessary. The bacteria that antibiotics are designed to eliminate mutate over time, changing enough to become resistant to the drugs presently used to fight them. The result is a growing number of antibiotic-resistant diseases, the superbugs, for which there are no effective medicines on the market. Among the best known is MRSA (Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus), a disease once generally restricted to hospital patients. Now, however, MRSA has spread to the community at large, infecting people who have not been hospitalized. Another of the superbugs currently encompasses both the worlds of medicine and current events: Acinetobacter baumannii, more familiarly known as Iraqibacter. Its nickname comes from its propensity to attack wounded soldiers, often those whose injuries have required treatment at many different hospital sites, each a potential source of bacterial infection.
According to Erin, what makes the hunt for new antibiotics more critical is that many big pharmaceutical companies have abandoned research on new antibiotics in favor of creating more profitable drugs.
“That kind of research [on new antibiotics] is left to smaller companies now,” Erin says.
(Melinta, with offices in New Haven and Illinois, employs some 55 people.) Erin points out that statins, the popular class of cholesterol-lowering drugs, make many times more money as do antibiotics. Not only do more people take statins, but they take them every day.
“You take antibiotics usually for 10- to 14 days when you have an infection, and they save your life,” she says.
The Connecticut Women’s Hall of Fame recognized Erin in 2014 as a Design and Innovation honoree, and earlier in 2010, Irish Voice Magazine named her one of the Irish Life Science 50. She received an award from the then-president of the Republic of Ireland, Mary McAleese, at the Irish consulate in New York.
“It was a total surprise. I really don’t know how it happened,” she says.
It probably wasn’t the right time to mention that while she is a fourth-generation Irish American on one side, her mother’s family is Italian.
Erin grew up in Wheeling, West Virginia and attended Wheeling Jesuit University. Her mother had encouraged her to aim for medical school, but a summer internship in a laboratory at Northwestern University convinced her to focus on research.
“I loved the lab, I loved the research,” she recalls.
It was also the first time Erin had lived far away from home for any significant period; though she boarded at college, it was only seven miles from her house.
She earned her doctorate in chemistry at Yale, and though her husband urged her to pursue an academic career, she opted for pursuing science in the business world. It was not the laboratory work in academia that had her worried, but financing the research.
“I was afraid I wouldn’t be a good grant writer,” she explains.
Erin and her husband chose Deep River because it was midway between their jobs when she worked for Pfizer and he at Yale.
Now she is in New Haven as well, except for the few days every other week she spends at Melinta’s corporate office in Illinois. She also travels with some regularity to Europe and Asia to talk about the research she is engaged in. Recent trips have included Tokyo, Shanghai, Beijing and Paris.
There is little time for recreation during Erin’s work week, but on summer weekends, she and her husband sail their 34-foot lobster boat, now moored in Essex. Both exercise daily at home with their P90X workout.
Developing new drugs is a difficult and time-consuming process involving not only the trial and error of scientific investigation, but also the protocols that surround experimental trials as the research advances. Erin and her colleagues have worked for some 15 years to develop an entirely new class of antibiotics, and hope the first of them will enter human clinical trials next year.
“What I am most proud of is my team. We have helped to built and nurture this through serious ups and downs and we have stayed together,” says Erin.
But she looks forward to seeing the results of their labor.
“When somebody that had multi-drug resistant MRSA is cured with our antibiotic, that will do it for me,” she says.