Pan-European drug discovery platform launched with 196 million-euro budget

The European Lead Factory, a novel platform for innovative drug discovery, was launched yesterday by an international consortium of 30 partners, with a proposed budget of around 196 million euros ($268.4 million). This partnership, the first of its kind, is supported by the Innovative Medicines Initiative (IMI) and creates unprecedented opportunities for the discovery of new medicines by providing public partners with an “industry-like” discovery platform to translate cutting-edge academic research into high-quality drug lead molecules on a scale and speed that was not possible previously.

This will be made possible in part through access to an exceptional collection of small molecules. Part of this collection will be contributed by pharmaceutical companies, and the other part will be a newly-synthesized compound collection built by the small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and academic institutions using the integrated knowledge of all consortium partners and through open innovation and crowd sourcing. Screening of this compound collection will be performed within the pharmaceutical companies and by a newly-established European Screening Centre. Stakeholders, including patient organizations and global health initiatives, are invited to contribute their knowledge and networks to the consortium to elevate the outcome of the early drug discovery process and to be part of the establishment of a new sustainable platform for early drug discovery.

Seven participating drugmakers to contribute 300,000 chemical compounds