Pharma firms to offer up compounds
23 Jul 2014
Seven pharmaceuticals companies are offering up their deprioritised compounds to UK researchers.
The Medical Research Council (MRC) announced yesterday that researchers within the UK will be given access to a ’virtual library’ of deprioritised pharmaceutical compounds for use in new studies to improve our understanding of a number of diseases, and help develop new treatments.
We fund academic researchers, so those in UK universities, hospitals and research institutes
MRC spokesperson
A full list of available compounds will be published later this year, when UK scientists will be able to apply for MRC funding to use them in academic research projects, the MRC said.
An MRC spokesperson told Process Engineering: “We fund academic researchers, so those in UK universities, hospitals and research institutes. We cannot award funding to pharmaceutical firms.”
The seven firms collaborating on this partnership include: AstraZeneca, GlaxoSmithKline, Pfizer, Janssen Research & Development LLC, Lilly, Takeda and UCB.
Though the compounds are seen as ’deprioritised’, it is hoped researchers will be able to find new ways of repurposing them to develop effective new medicines.
Academic researchers will study the compounds so as to better understand how a disease takes hold in the body, and how it could be slowed down or stopped, the MRC said.
As the compounds have already undergone various preliminary developments, it will allow any new treatments arising from the research to reach the market faster.
