An Interview with Gerhard Ecker, the new President of EFMC
Gabriele Costantino: Gerhard, the starting of a new presidency is a good occasion to take stock of the state of EFMC and of medicinal chemistry in general in Europe. What’s your vision for the next years?
Gerhard Ecker: Gabriele, let me first of all emphasize that I feel very honoured that the Council of EFMC elected me as President at its meeting in 2007 in Portoroz. Medicinal Chemistry in Europe is facing tough times with decreasing numbers of NCEs, several big mergers and permanently increasing costs for R&D. I will do my best to serve the Medicinal Chemistry Community in these challenging times. Within the past few years EFMC progressed a lot and now is the key learned society in Europe for all aspects related to Medicinal Chemistry. When I joined the EFMC Council in 2000, the situation was very different to what I experience now. The only real activities of EFMC were the International Symposium on Medicinal Chemistry, the Nauta award and the exchange of a session with ACS each second year. This changed dramatically the past few years. The impressive improvement is due to the enthusiasm, scientific reputation and visionary power of the past presidents Henk Timmermann, Ferran Sanz and Roberto Pellicciari. Especially Roberto gave EFMC a major boost in initiating a lot of activities. It is hard to keep this level of innovation, and as I stated in Portoroz one of my main aims will be to establish an infrastructure to guarantee sustainability of all these achievements. With respect to my vision, I see EFMC as the main driving force in promoting the discipline of Medicinal Chemistry throughout Europe utilising the large network we have already. This should lead to a stronger presence of Medicinal Chemistry in calls of the FP7, the upcoming FP8 and the Innovative Medicines Initiative. Our activities and promotion should strengthen our member societies and help them to recruit more individual members and to pursue their activities. Finally I would like to see EFMC actively participating in EU-projects.
GC: Can you anticipate your main commitments as President of the EFMC? What will be the continuities with the former presidencies, and what the innovation you intend to bring up?
GE: As already expressed, one of my main commitments is to create an infrastructure which guarantees that the activities started by the former presidents can keep the high quality they have been started with. This includes the committees, meetings, the newsletter, the short course and obviously a permanent improvement of the Web-page. Up to now all the work was done on a voluntary basis by the EC-members, which are academic and industrial scientists. A first step towards a more professional administrative structure was the employment of Nele Coulier as EFMC administrative secretary. Ms. Coulier did a master in philology and now works part time in the office of Ly Differding to assist in all the daily routine tasks and the management of the web-page. In the first EC-meeting I chaired the EC also approved my proposal to establish an advisory board. This board, composed of leading and highly visible Medicinal Chemists, should act as a sort of think tank for future directions, hot topics and also help to further strengthen our network in Europe and abroad. Under my chairmanship of the Information and Communication Committee we already started to establish a job portal and we proposed to establish individual membership for non-Europeans. Covering already almost whole Europe with our member societies I deem it important that we increase our visibility also outside of Europe.
One of our main tasks will also be to start a corporate membership campaign. EFMC should become highly attractive for pharmaceutical companies so that we can strengthen the links to the scientists from Industry. This includes also the Innovative Medicines Initative, which is a public private partnership, spending 2 billion euro for the next 6 years on pharmaceutical R&D. On my feeling EFMC is more than ready not only to make lobbying for Medicinal Chemistry, but also to start actively participating in EU calls as a legal partner. Obviously all this requires a lot of individual input, but I have a highly motivated executive committee on my side. So I am looking forward to exciting and challenging years!
GC: EFMC gathers together more than 6,000 medicinal chemists from both academia and industry. European medicinal chemistry has the potential for being one of the world-leading drivers of the research in biochemical and health sciences. What are your personal and the EFMC’s commitments to create a real community of medicinal chemists in Europe, from both a cultural, political and economical point of view?
GE: First of all I would like to state that European medicinal chemistry IS already one of the world-leading drivers for innovation in pharmaceutical sciences. The EFMC-ISMC is the World’s largest medicinal chemistry meeting, bringing together more than 1.400 scientists each even year for exchange of ideas and discussion of recent developments. Also our other events mentioned below are highly appreciated by the community and the schools are always fully booked, as was also our first short course. This shows that we have already a very lively community. Our membership in the European Pharma Leadership Forum will provide us with the possibility to discuss our visions and to share our opinions with other leading learned societies in Europe and to communicate this to the politicians in Brussels. Furthermore, no one should forget that each drug and each protein is a chemical entity, so medicinal chemistry always will play a central role in the drug discovery and development process. We will not stop communicating this to the Innovative Medicines Initiative, where medicinal chemistry was a bit underrepresented in the last call.
What definitely can be improved is our reach out to the individual scientists in Europe. Several of our member societies do not provide us with the addresses of their members, so we need to rely on them in forwarding our messages. As I am personally a member of three of our member societies I know quite well that this does not always happen. So I sincerely hope that MedChemWatch will contribute to distributing the information on all our activities and to stimulating discussions and to exchanging thoughts and opinions.
GC: One of the missions of EFMC is to promote aggregation and cultural exchange between the members. Can you briefly summarize what are the main activities of EFMC, and which instruments can an European medicinal chemist use to get information about EFMC and its activities (besides this newsletter, of course) ?
GE: As already outlined, our flagship event is the EFMC-ISMC, which takes place every even year. Additionally to the ISMC we have the ASMC together with Chembridge and the Frontiers in Medicinal Chemistry series as major events, which we organise each odd year. Furthermore, we also sponsor around 10 scientific events per year. Just two weeks ago I had the pleasure to open the first EFMC short course, which focused on Improving Compound Quality. With respect to education and training, we have one accredited medicinal chemistry school (ESMEC in Urbino) and we sponsor additional 4 schools. Our web-page is steadily improving, we publish each year our yearbook Medicinal Chemistry in Europe, and finally we have MedChemWatch, the e-newsletter of EFMC. Last but not least we convene three awards each second year and we have session exchange agreements with three major international learned societies. Looking to the future, we are thinking on several concrete projects, such as RSS feeds and the creation of an expert network like linkedIn. If you would like to be constantly updated on our activities, please register at on our web-page www.efmc.info.
GC: Thank you very much and good luck for your presidency ! Would you like to conclude by addressing a short message to all the readers of this newsletter?
GE: Yes, of course! On my personal point of view Medicinal Chemistry in Europe is different to many other scientific communities. When attending one of the EFMC events I always fee like belonging to a big family. So please take actively part in our “family live” and do not hesitate to contact me with any complaints, comments, wishes, and ideas you have!
By Gabriele Costantino
