The Centre for Medicines Discovery (CMD) is a key member of a new consortium, “Enabling and Unlocking biology in the Open” (EUbOPEN), which has been awarded an Innovative Medicines Initiative grant worth over 66 million Euros. The project will last five years and deliver high quality chemical tools that can be used to investigate the biology of disease and discover new targets for drug discovery.
The EUbOPEN project builds on the efforts of the successful ULTRA-DD consortium previously led by the University of Oxford, and will be led by Goethe University Frankfurt, and the pharmaceutical company Boehringer Ingelheim. The consortium consists of 22 partners from academia and industry that will work together to develop high quality chemical tools that can be used to investigate the biology of disease and discover new targets for drug discovery. The project outputs will be made openly available to the research community, without restriction, including chemogenomic library sets, chemical probes, assay protocols and associated research data.
The research at the University of Oxford will be directed by Professor Chas Bountra, the Head of the CMD, and the University of Oxford’s Pro Vice-chancellor for innovation, and Dr Jon Elkins, Principal Investigator. The entire CMD team are incredibly excited to work alongside European and international partners on this endeavour:
Professor Chas Bountra commented: “We will continue to work with our many local experts and our large international network of academic and industry scientists, to accelerate new biology, disease understanding and the development of new medicines for patients.”
Dr. Jon Elkins added: “It is wonderful that our consortium was chosen for this exciting project and we look forward to working with our collaborators to generate these valuable new research tools and datasets”
The financial support for the project consists of a grant from the IMI and cash/in-kind contributions from companies in the European Federation of Pharmaceutical Industries and Associations (EFPIA), IMI Associated Partners and other international partners. IMI is a joint undertaking between the European Union and EFPIA that aims to speed up the development of better and safer medicines for patients. IMI supports collaborative research projects and builds networks of industrial and academic experts in order to boost pharmaceutical innovation in Europe.
The official press release describing the new project can be found here: www.EUbOPEN.org/news
Website: EUbOPEN.org
Twitter: @EUbOPEN