“With the pattern of diseases such as cancer being different in virtually every different patient, personalized medicine is absolutely essential to improving patient outcomes.”
Three top life sciences research institutes in the Netherlands have formed a $38 million (€28 million) partnership to advance personalized medicine. The groups say they will focus on funding projects that seek to develop new ways of targeting drug delivery to specific disease sites within the body as a means of reducing dosages and minimizing side effects while boosting the effectiveness of medication. The BioMedical Materials program, the Center for Translational Molecular Medicine and Top Institute Pharma say the development of tailored drug therapies along with the imaging guided and targeted drug delivery techniques that these newly funded projects aim to develop, are widely regarded as one of the keys to highly personalized medicine.
In total, the three institutes bring together more than 180 national and international partners from the public and private sector, as well as four charitable foundations. Together, the three institutes have a total budget of almost $950 million (€700 million) available for research projects over a 5-year period. Half of the total funding budget is provided by the Dutch government, with the remaining fifty percent being provided by the three institutes' academic and industrial partners.
Already the partnership announced the funding for seven projects, which are mainly aiming at therapies for cardiovascular diseases and cancer. The projects resulted from a joint call for project proposals that was initiated by the three institutes in recognition of the fact that imaging guided and targeted drug delivery is a highly interdisciplinary area of research. Combined, these projects bring together 12 institutes and 14 industrial parties. The effort, the groups say, seeks to leverage the strength of the individual institutes – drug development by Top Institute Pharma, molecular diagnostics and imaging by the Center for Translational Molecular Medicine, and biomaterials and regenerative medicine from the BioMedical Materials program. The seven projects are the first to encompass competencies from all three institutes.
“With this joint initiative of the three public-private partnerships in the Dutch life-sciences sector, the Netherlands stimulates collaboration and cooperation between industry and academia on a size and scale that is unique in Europe,” says Wim Deetman, chairman of the executive board of the BioMedical Materials program.
“With the pattern of diseases such as cancer being different in virtually every different patient, personalized medicine is absolutely essential to improving patient outcomes,” says Hans Hoogervorst, chairman of the supervisory board of the Center for Translational Molecular Medicine. “The outstanding quality of the proposals selected from the joint call should really help us to put personalized medicine into practice.”