Leeds joins partners in £170m European drug development project
Chemists at the University of Leeds will join a £170 million pan-European project, bringing together university researchers and pharmaceutical companies to develop the next generation of drugs.
The European Lead Factory, a novel platform for innovative drug
discovery, will bring together an international consortium of 30
partners. This is the first partnership of its kind, supported by the
Innovative Medicines Initiative (IMI), the world’s largest
public-private partnership in health.
The project will create
unprecedented opportunities to jointly discover new medicines, through
access to a ‘molecule library’ collection based at BioCity Scotland.
Traditionally,
pharmaceutical companies have had vast libraries of compounds held in
safeguarded corporate chemical collections which can be screened in the
hunt for potential medicines. Access to these compound libraries is
usually highly restricted.
The seven participating
pharmaceutical companies in the European Lead Factory will collectively
contribute a total of 300,000 compounds to a new library. An additional
200,000 compounds will be developed jointly by researchers from the
Universities of Leeds and Nottingham in the UK and by small and medium
enterprises (SMEs).
This will lead to the establishment of the
Joint European Compound Collection consisting of half a million
compounds that will be accessible to all project partners and to any
European organisations that submit promising new targets for drug
discovery selected through competitive calls.
Professor Adam
Nelson, from the School of Chemistry, will
coordinate the review and selection of innovative chemistry proposals
from across Europe that will enhance the Joint European Compound
Collection. The team in the School of Chemistry, led by Professor
Nelson, Professor Steve Marsden and Dr Richard Foster, will contribute
to this effort.
‘It is very exciting that innovative new
chemistry from academia will be brought to bear in a wide range of drug
discovery programmes. This platform of innovation will be complemented
by the pharmaceutical industry’s ability to develop marketed drugs, and
will result in a new model for drug development in Europe,” said
Professor Adam Nelson.
You can read more about this project on the University's external website.