Pharma majors enter CSN experimental medicines consortium

Leading drugmakers AstraZeneca, GlaxoSmithKline, Lundbeck, Organon (now part of Schering-Plough) and Wyeth have entered into a consortium agreement with UK-based contract research organization P1vital to establish and validate healthy volunteer central nervous system experimental medicine models.

Under the accord, P1vital and its partners will fund a series of studies over a period of three years to establish the sensitivity of healthy volunteer CNS experimental medicine models and to validate their ability to detect the efficacy of novel compounds. The studies will be carried out by P1vital in collaboration with five internationally-renowned academic clinical psychopharmacology groups in the UK, based at the University of Bristol, Cardiff University, the Institute of Psychiatry, the University of Manchester and the University of Oxford.