Bringing academic discoveries closer to patients

SciLifeLab is now launching a new Drug Discovery and Development platform. This national resource will offer drug discovery expertise to Swedish researchers in order to advance academic discoveries towards novel treatments of benefit to patients.

With support from the Swedish government, presented in the Research and Innovation Bill 2013-2016, SciLifeLab can now offer drug discovery expertise to Swedish researchers. This effort will combine academic groundbreaking discoveries with drug discovery expertise and development traditionally only found in the pharmaceutical industry.

“We believe that this will facilitate translation of existing innovative projects at Swedish universities towards therapeutic development”, says Karin Forsberg Nilsson, Scientific Director at SciLifeLab, and Acting Director for the Uppsala site of the DDD platform.

The Drug Discovery & Development platform (DDD platform) will focus on early drug discovery and take promising candidates as far as demonstrating in vivo efficacy in relevant models. Through an open call for projects, Swedish academic scientists will be able to propose projects for development at the platform. When a project have reached a level of maturity and commercial value it will have a small-molecule or human antibody lead and a documented line-of-sight for further development. The project can then be taken over by a multitude of potential stakeholders.

On October 2nd, the SciLifeLab board decided to make the following eight units available on a national level:

• Recombinant protein expression and therapeutics
• Biochemical and cellular screening
• Human antibody therapeutics
• Hit-to-lead
• Lead identification chemistry
• Molecular interactions & Structural biology
• Uppsala Drug Optimization and Pharmaceutical Profiling (UDOPP)
• In vitro & Systems pharmacology

The DDD platform has expertise in a wide range of areas and welcomes both small molecules and protein therapeutics projects.

“We have already started up parts of the operation, and are now looking to recruit scientists with drug discovery and development expertise to our eight units”, says Per Arvidsson, Platform Director for the Stockholm site of the DDD platform.