Bayer leads €196m European drug discovery project
Hannah Blake
pharmaphorum
A new €196 million project has been initiated by seven European pharmaceutical companies with the aim of enhancing early drug discovery and addressing the need for innovative drugs.
Coordinated by Bayer HealthCare, the five-year project will create a small molecule library collection allowing drug discovery on promising targets from pharma and academia. The other six companies involved are AstraZeneca, Sanofi, Lundbeck , Merck KGaA, UCB and Janssen, the European arm of Johnson &, Johnson. Together, these companies will collectively contribute at least 300,000 substances to the initiative, named the European Lead Factory.
“The European Lead Factory is an outstanding example of a project in which public-private partnerships enable collaborative drug discovery. The platform brings together academia and industry as well as Small and Medium Enterprises in a unique partnership aiming to discover innovative medicines. Bayer is committed to further develop this novel platform by providing decades of experience in drug development. The joint efforts of the consortium will support drug discovery and hopefully generate new therapies for patients.”
Hanno Wild, Senior Vice President and Head of Candidate Generation &, Exploration at Bayer HealthCare Global Drug Discovery.
The novel consortium is a public-private partnership supported by Europe’s Innovative Medicines Initiative (IMI), which receives funding from the European Union and the EFPIA for its research programmes.
Related news:
Drugmakers, academics pool R&,D in $265 mln EU project (Reuters)
Innovative drug discovery in Europe supported by Bayer (News-medical.net)
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