IMI funds European Lead Factory initiative
Partnership will build screening facility and collection of up to 500,000 candidate drug compounds
In an effort to speed up the discovery of new medicines, Europe’s Innovative Medicines Initiative (IMI) plans to build an EU-wide public-private partnership – the European Lead Factory – to combine a comprehensive collection of candidate drug molecules with an industry like European Screening Centre.
The pharmaceutical companies involved in the future project have committed to contributing at least 300,000 chemical compounds from their otherwise safeguarded corporate chemical collections. The teams of universities and small and medium-sized enterprises in the project will have access to this unique library of chemicals, and are expected to add another 200,000 compounds.
The Screening Centre will build on industry’s expertise in ‘high-throughput screening’ – to test hundreds of thousands of unique chemicals for biological activity.
The European Lead Factory will provide to public partners an ‘industry like’ discovery platform to translate academic research into high-quality candidate drug molecules on a scale and speed that was not possible previously.
Such candidates will be directly introduced to the drug development process for further refinement or will serve as research tools to improve our understanding of disease mechanisms.
Michel Goldman, IMI’s executive director said: ‘The joint screening centre will give academic teams a unique opportunity to work in conditions that meet industry standards, facilitating the translation of their findings into actual treatments for patients.
‘This shared facility, together with the joint European Compound Collection, will greatly advance the chances of success in the discovery of new medicines for researchers in Europe.’
The total budget for the project announced in IMI’s 5th Call for proposals is €169m. Up to €80m will be provided by the European Commission’s 7th Framework Programme for Research (FP7), and the remaining amount of up to €89m will be provided by in kind contributions from the participating companies, which are members of the European Federation of Pharmaceutical Industries and Associations (EFPIA).