Francis Enane, PhD, has more than 15 years of experience as a translational scientist with a focus on deploying advanced technologies to enhance high-throughput processes within drug discovery. His experiences span multiple industries including academic, biotechnology and pharmaceutical companies.
He has contributed to the development of various therapies across multiple disease types including oncology, cardiometabolic and rare blood diseases. His scientific goals are to develop treatments that selectively target and eliminate diseased cells without harming healthy cells.
He is also passionate about enhancing patient diversity within human clinical trials to ensure that the cohort of patients in studies are reflective of the real-world clinical applications.
Enane was previously an automation specialist at Novo Nordisk research center in Indianapolis. At Novo Nordisk he developed several high-throughput automated workflows for cell-based assays utilized in compound screening of both small and large molecule drugs. His efforts contributed to the identification of various lead candidate drugs for the treatment of diseases such as obesity, type 2 diabetes and rare blood diseases, most of which are undergoing clinical development.
Before joining Novo Nordisk, he was a senior application scientist at Beckman Coulter Life Sciences. While working at Beckman Coulter, he developed marketing content for automation technologies used in drug discovery ranging from next generation sequencing, in-vitro cell-based assays and proteomics.
During the heat of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic he contributed to the development of automated COVID screening and sequencing workflows used for global surveillance programs to detect circulating variants of the virus. While at Beckman Coulter, he managed extensive collaborative relationships with various industries including academics, contract research organizations and biopharmaceuticals.
Enane has unique expertise in pre-clinical and clinical drug discovery including utilization of high-throughput OMICS datasets such as next generation sequencing for biomarker identification, in-vitro assay development and deployment for compound screening, optimization and process implementation of automated methods for high-throughput screening, lead identification and selection of candidate compounds for clinical validation and application.
He is a resident of the Butler-Turkington Neighborhood in Indiana with his wife, two kids and two lovely chickens. He likes to volunteer at inner city schools initiating conversations with students on a wide variety of topics and to motivate them about their interests in science and technology. He enjoys athletics and cross-country running, soccer and basketball. He is also an avid bird watcher and photographer and was a recent recipient of the Audubon Society bird photography of the month award.