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 project is launched today by an international consortium of 30 partners and is funded by the EU's Innovative Medicines Initiative , which was set up to reverse the decline in the discovery of new medicines over the past thirty years. BioCity Scotland in Lanarkshire will host the new European Lead Factory screening centre and Joint European Compound Collection with a second screening centre in the Netherlands. This new facility will house a library of 300,000 compounds donated by the participating pharmaceutical companies, with an additional 200,000 to be created by academics and SMEs including the Universities of Nottingham and Leeds. The ELF is significant because for the first time the creativity and pioneering methods of academic chemists will have the full resources of highly efficient synthetic production facilities of the SME's and the medicinal chemistry expertise of the Pharmaceutical industry.