Nottingham in €196 million European drug discovery drive  

Pioneering chemists from The University of Nottingham are taking part in the biggest-ever European research programme to speed up the discovery of new drugs.

The scientists will be working with leading drug discovery services partner, Sygnature Discovery in BioCity Nottingham, as part of a new European Lead Factory – a huge innovative collaboration between several of Europe’s largest pharmaceutical companies, small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and academic researchers. The project will bring €6.2m from the European project into the City of Nottingham.

The European Lead Factory, launched on February 7 by an international consortium of 30 partners, is supported by the Innovative Medicines Initiative (IMI). It aims are to provide public partners with an ‘industry-like’ discovery platform to translate academic research into high-quality drug lead molecules.

This exceptional collection of small molecules will be contributed to in part by pharmaceutical companies and in part by a newly synthesized compound collection built by the 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. BioCity Scotland in Lanarkshire will be part of the new European Lead Factory Screening centre and Joint European Compound Collection with a second major site in the Netherlands.