“This unique project is an excellent example of how a public-private partnership can transform the way in which the pharmaceutical sector identifies new medicines.”
Seven leading pharmaceutical companies are among a group of large and small pharmaceutical companies joining with academia in a $261.9 million (€196 million) European public-private partnership that seeks to speed translation of academic research into innovative therapies.
“This unique project is an excellent example of how a public-private partnership can transform the way in which the pharmaceutical sector identifies new medicines,” says Michel Goldman, executive director of the Innovative Medicines Initiative, the European public-private established five years ago to revitalize European pharmaceutical. “For the first time, it will give European researchers unprecedented access to industry chemical collections and facilitate the translation of their findings into actual treatments for patients.”
Known as the European Lead Factory, the partnership will bring what it calls an “industry-like drug discovery platform” for cutting-edge academic research to develop lead molecules that it says will be done on a “scale and speed that was not possible previously.”
The partnership will draw from a library of 500,000 chemical compounds, 300,000 of which come from the partnership’s member companies, which include Bayer Pharma, AstraZeneca, H. Lundbeck, Janssen Pharmaceuticals, Merck, Sanofi, and UCB Pharma. The rest of the compounds will come from smaller companies and academia. The provided compounds will form a Joint European Compound Collection that will be accessible to all project partners and to public organizations offering new targets for drug discovery screening.
The compounds provided by smaller companies and academic institutions will include newly synthesized compounds developed using the integrated knowledge of all consortium partners and through open innovation and crowd sourcing, the partnership said. Screening of this collection will be performed within the pharmaceutical companies and by a newly-established European Screening Centre.
Patient organizations, global health initiatives, and other stakeholders are invited to contribute their knowledge and networks to the consortium to improve the outcome of the early drug discovery process and to be part of the establishment of a new sustainable platform for early drug discovery.
The Innovative Medicines Initiative, Europe's largest public-private drug development initiative, is supporting the Lead Factory. The European Commission’s Seventh Framework Programme for Research is providing $106.9 million (€80 million) to fund the effort, and participating companies are providing $160 million (€116 million) in funding.
The European Screening Centre will assist public contributors of novel targets in the development of tests that will allow them to apply industrial screening methods to the library of 500,000 compounds at their sites in Scotland and The Netherlands to evaluate new compounds that are active against the novel targets.
“Establishing this public private partnership brings unprecedented opportunities to develop a sustainable ground breaking drug discovery platform based on superior input and output by connecting top notch science, decades of experience in drug discovery and development and the agility of SMEs,” says Ton Rijnders, scientific director of the non-profit TI Pharma and head of screening for the Lead Factory.
February 08, 2013
http://www.burrillreport.com/article-public_private_partnership_to_spur_eu_innovation.html