European centre for modern drug discovery to be established in Hamburg
European ScreeningPort, a company that will run a state-of-the-art drug discovery service centre, is to set up its base in Hamburg, Germany.
European ScreeningPort, a company that will run a state-of-the-art drug discovery service centre, is to set up its base in Hamburg, Germany.
It will build upon research results generated in academia and will enable a more systematic and efficient search for promising new compounds that can subsequently be further developed. Both Evotec and the City of Hamburg have invested in the new company, which will be run as a public private partnership. This novel concept in advancing drug discovery will also be supported with considerable funds from the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research. Although still in an early phase, the project has already raised more than Euro 7m in financing.
ScreeningPort provides the missing link in Europe between academic research and the pharmaceutical industry. The research centre will accelerate the translation of promising results generated in basic research on the causes of diseases into new therapeutics. It will act as a service provider that enables academic research institutes to access its state-of-the-art technology, its vast number of chemical compounds as well as its sample and data processing capabilities.
New therapeutic concepts developed at universities can, in future, undergo the same standardised, more efficient and thus more cost-effective development processes that have, until now, been available only to industry. Pharmaceutical and biotech companies, for their part, can benefit from the research results generated at ScreeningPort and thus complement their own drug research.
Although ScreeningPort is still at an early stage, a number of European research institutes have already been tied in, including the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH Zuerich) and the Vienna-based Institute of Molecular Biotechnology of the Austrian Academy of Sciences.
The project was initiated by Evotec, a leading German drug discovery and development company, and was implemented by north German life science agency Norgenta, which promotes the structural development of life sciences in the federal states of Hamburg and Schleswig-Holstein.
"We know from our many years of experience that academic research generates a plethora of excellent scientific ideas that require an industrial environment for further development,'"said Joern Aldag, president and ceo of Evotec. "The initial step in this development is the search to identify biologically active chemical compounds. The European ScreeningPort provides us with the link that translates scientific discoveries into results that pharmaceutical and biotechnological companies, such as Evotec, can build upon."
Norgenta managing director Dr Kathrin Adlkofer added: "Our main objective is to bring together existing excellence in science and business. ScreeningPort will see a unique network of partners in academia and industry who will mutually be able to benefit from pooling their expertise in medical science, technological know-how and industrial performance."