Duffy’s roots stretch to Melinta’s founding

PHOTO | John Stearns Erin Duffy, chief scientific officer, Melinta Therapeutics Inc.

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By John Stearns

Erin Duffy joined Melinta Therapeutics Inc. shortly after its founding, evolving into her current role as chief scientific officer as the company itself evolved from aspiring startup to the cusp of its first antibiotic approval and a pipeline that includes a new class of antibiotics targeting bacterial superbugs.

“We were very fortunate to recruit her very, very early on,” said Susan Froshauer, president and CEO of CURE, a nonprofit that works to support and build Connecticut's bioscience sector, who was founding CEO of Melinta's predecessor company, Rib-X Pharmaceuticals Inc., until 2010. “She's gone on to become quite a leader and quite an advocate for all of the great science we do in our company.”

Duffy, 47, oversees the research team at Melinta's New Haven office, where she's worked since Jan. 2002. The office has about 35 people.

She has led Melinta's ESKAPE Pathogen Program from its infancy — each letter in ESKAPE representing a drug-resistant superbug — working to develop one antibiotic that can kill all. Melinta's website calls the program its most advanced preclinical initiative. She also contributes to other medication development.

Melinta hopes to begin human trials for ESKAPE antibiotics next year.

“When we are successful — not if, but when — that's going to be a big deal,” Duffy said.

To have a hand in developing such important drugs is exciting, said Duffy, but one of the things she's most proud of, to be part of and have a hand in creating it, is her research team.

“The team that we assembled here to do the research is just this unbelievably talented and dedicated group of people,” Duffy said. “ … It's really the heart of this group that is just to me probably the reason I get out of bed and come here every day.”

Duffy was recruited by Froshauer after first meeting her at Pfizer in Groton, where each worked in the 1990s. Duffy began her career there as a senior research scientist

Then, in 2000, a Yale grad school friend told her about a new company starting up, Achillion Pharmaceuticals Inc., which needed somebody with her skills in computational chemistry and drug design. She joined Achillion in Dec. 2000 as associate director of innovative discovery technologies, working in the same 300 George St. building where Melinta is located, and remembers the building as a shell of what it is today.

“I remember thinking, 'Oh, what am I doing?' ” Duffy said, recalling the scientifically rich character of Groton that she left.

But the work proved exciting and fun. About three months into it, Froshauer called to recruit her and also tap the chemistry expertise of Duffy's husband, William Jorgensen, a Yale professor and one of three scientific co-founders, along with Yale professors Peter Moore and Thomas Steitz, who won the Nobel Prize in chemistry. Duffy, though, remained at Achillion for about nine more months to build a team before joining Rib-X.

“That was sort of how it all happened,” she said.

She became chief scientific officer in 2011.

She received her Ph.D. in physical organic chemistry from Yale in 1994 and was a Howard Hughes postdoctoral fellow. She received a bachelor's degree in chemistry in 1990 from Wheeling Jesuit University in Wheeling, W. Va., where she grew up. Her mother was a nurse and father worked for the gas company.

“I think I always liked math and science,” Duffy said, adding that her mother wanted her to consider medical school, but that wasn't the direction Duffy desired.

With a small graduating class of about 120 at Wheeling and few science majors, Duffy received a lot of instructional attention. Her chemistry professor saw her talent and encouraged her to consider graduate school and apply for a summer fellowship, which she landed at Northwestern University, in chemistry.

“It was a lot of fun to work in the lab and that's what I decided that's what I wanted to do,” said Duffy, who went on to Yale for graduate school and where she met her future husband, Jorgensen.

Sean Murphy, who retired as vice president of business development for pharmaceutical company Abbott Laboratories in 2010 and went on to cofound Malin Corp. PLC, a Dublin-based company with offices in New Haven and the U.K. that invests in life sciences companies and has $45 million invested in Melinta, called Duffy a “brilliant scientist … a true pioneer in the field.”

Murphy, a non-executive director on Melinta's board, said Duffy is a team-builder and excellent communicator, able to simplify complex science as she recently did for a group of Malin lawyers, and business and financial people in a half-day presentation.

“They came back totally energized … and the thing that shocked most of them was that Erin was able to communicate in such down-to-earth, very easy to understand (ways) some very, very sophisticated science,” he said. “So it's rare. I've been around scientists for a number of years at Abbott and after Abbott and it's hard to get that combination of a person that's deep in the science that has a very warm and enchanting personality, but able to communicate.”