Six independent translational research organizations hope to accelerate development of innovative therapies by working together to facilitate international cooperation, develop standards and performance measurements, share best practices, and collaborate on drug development projects.

The newly formed Global Alliance of Leading Drug Discovery and Development Centers’ charter members include Canada’s Centre for Drug Research and Development, Germany’s Lead Discovery Center, the United States’ Scripps Translational Science Institute, United States, Belgium’s Centre for Drug Design and Discovery, and the United Kingdom’s Medical Research Council Technology and Cancer Research Technology centers.

“We see a multitude of translational research initiatives around the world, but until now, these have for the most part, worked in isolation of one another,” says Centre for Drug Research and Development president and CEO Karimah Es Sabar. “This alliance will be a powerful vehicle in bringing such organizations together, leveraging one another’s strengths, and ultimately making for a much more effective global translational research environment.”

Together, the six organizations represent nearly 400 drug developers collaborating with tens of thousands of academic scientists around the globe on over 165 innovative therapeutic projects targeting significant unmet medical needs, according to Cancer Research Technology.

Members of the alliance hope to improve biomedical innovation and translational research. Specific goals fall into the broad categories of innovation and therapeutic value. The alliance’s innovation goals are to increase the number of patents and the stream of knowledge provided by academic sources, the number and success of spin-out companies from academia, knowledge among academic researchers of the drug discovery and development process, and the number of significant risk-sharing collaborations with pharmaceutical and biotech industries. Its therapeutic value goals are to improve the conversion of global early-stage technology into therapies, to increase success in clinical therapies for diseases with unmet medical needs, and to maximize the economic and societal return on public health research funding.

The alliance also hopes to build its membership. Organizations that are fully-integrated translational centers with in-house expertise and research infrastructure in drug development from idea to proof-of-concept, and that are closely aligned with academic inventors as the primary source of innovation are eligible to apply for membership.