Channelling discovery

Jelena Mann is Professor of Epigenetics at Newcastle University and the
co-founder and former CEO of FibroFind, where she serves as
non-executive director

Throughout her career, Jelena has combined deep biological understanding with commercial clarity to identify structural limitations in traditional approaches and position practical solutions that advance fibrosis and epigenetics.

Jelena played a central role in building FibroFind into a commercially focused business, establishing its scientific foundations and translating early insight into a scalable platform. Under her leadership, the company progressed from concept to a globally recognised partner to the world’s leading pharmaceutical companies.

Journey from academic scientist to founder and CEO

I never intended to become a CEO. I spent my career as an academic scientist studying fibrosis along with the four founders.

Together, we had accumulated more than 100 years of research but shared a persistent frustration. However interesting our discoveries, we had no model that could tell us with confidence whether they would translate into patients.

That led us to develop a bioreactor capable of keeping precision‑cut slices of healthy and diseased human tissue alive outside the body for prolonged periods, allowing potential therapies to be tested in the biological setting they were intended to treat.

We built it to answer our own scientific questions, but pharmaceutical companies became interested in testing their compounds, which led to further development.

Eventually, demand outgrew what we could deliver in an academic setting. In 2019, we founded FibroFind and I became CEO. It was never a planned career transition. I simply followed the science until it led me from running an academic research group to running a company.

Challenges of turning scientific research into a
commercial proposition

I quickly learned that scientific value and commercial value are not the same. A technology may be innovative but that tells you surprisingly little about whether somebody will use it to make real decisions.

We were fortunate to spend several years operating within Newcastle University before establishing FibroFind, which allowed pharmaceutical scientists to bring us compounds and test whether the model answered commercial questions.

We stopped solely focusing on experiments we found scientifically interesting and started understanding what information drug developers need before progressing a molecule. It taught us that reproducibility matters as much as novelty. If an experiment contributes to a drug development decision, the client needs confidence in the underlying biology, how the tissue is sourced, how the study is performed and how the data is interpreted. Commercialisation is less about selling the science than learning how to deliver it reliably.

Why promising preclinical research does not
always translate into clinical success

Preclinical models have contributed enormously to medicine but every model is an approximation of the target disease. Human disease exists within a complicated biological environment involving different cell types, tissue architecture, genetics, age, disease severity and treatment history, which is difficult to reproduce experimentally.

A drug can perform beautifully in a model and disappoint in patients, not because the experiment was badly conducted but because the biology that determined the clinical response was simply not present.

‘I simply followed the science until it led me from running an academic research group to running a company’

This is why I became interested in studying medicines in viable human tissue, particularly tissue with established disease. When developing a treatment for fibrotic lung, kidney or liver disease, it is logical to ask how that drug behaves in the corresponding fibrotic tissue before moving into patients.

It will never tell you everything that will happen clinically but it can provide valuable evidence in the transition from promising experimental biology to a potential medicine.

How human‑relevant models can strengthen
decision‑making during drug discovery

The important word is not human but relevant. A cell growing in a dish is human but it is not operating within the complex cellular neighbourhood of its original organ.

Precision‑cut tissue slices are thin sections of viable human organ that preserve multiple cell types and much of their natural three‑dimensional organisation, allowing researchers to study a potential medicine in something considerably closer to the biological environment it will eventually encounter in a patient.

The ability to work with diseased tissue is particularly interesting. Rather than creating an experimental approximation of fibrosis, inflammation or another pathology, a candidate can be tested in tissue in which that disease has already developed naturally in a person.

The question then becomes wonderfully simple: what does your drug do in the tissue you want to treat? That does not replace animal studies, cell systems or clinical trials but it can add highly relevant human evidence when there is still time to make a different development decision.

What you have learned from building and scaling a
science‑led life sciences business

Building FibroFind taught me that science‑led companies succeed or fail on much more than the science. In the beginning, we did virtually everything ourselves, from experiments and client reports to tissue logistics and cleaning freezers. This meant we understood every part of the business. As the company grew, that model had to evolve. Processes replaced individual knowledge, automation replaced repetitive manual work and we had to recruit people who were better than us at particular jobs and trust them to do them.

I learnt that scientific credibility and commercial credibility have to be earned separately. A strong publication record may persuade somebody to have the first conversation with you but it will not necessarily persuade them to come back.

That depends on whether you deliver what you promised, whether the data withstands scrutiny and how you behave when something does not go according to plan. In science‑led businesses, you cannot promise certainty but you can promise rigour, transparency and accountability.

Experience as a female scientist, founder and
leader in the sector

I have never thought of myself as a female scientist, founder or leader. I am a scientist who founded and led a company and being a woman is incidental to that.
To me, it is like asking whether having blue eyes has affected my career in science. It has not. I expect to be judged on the quality of my work, the decisions I make and what I deliver and I would not want it any other way.

That is not to suggest that other women have not encountered barriers because of their sex or that inequalities do not exist because clearly, they do. It is simply not the lens through which I have viewed my own career.

Perhaps genuine equality is reached when that becomes completely unremarkable: when a woman building and leading a successful scientific company requires no more explanation than a man doing exactly the same thing.