Chafing at the slow pace of commercial development of the drug, a disease advocacy group made last week to fund new drugs for his district . Last week, cystic fibrosis (CF) Foundation Bethesda, Maryland, has announced it will invest at least $ 30 million in a small biotech company, Aurora Biosciences of San Diego, to identify compounds that could be useful in treating CF. The project, initially fed by a gift of $ 20 million from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, marks a new departure in the growing trend of patient groups that support biomedical research.
The plan calls for Aurora to several one hundred thousand molecules display in his library over the next five years and identify two or three that could be candidate drugs for CF. If this approach gives promising results "," CF Foundation plans to pay an additional amount of $ 16.9 million Aurora to prepare candidates for clinical trials. Carry drugs through the final approval, however, would require co-investment by a major pharmaceutical company. The benefits would be shared between the CF Foundation and its business partners, but the foundation would immediately plow all its own charges directly in research on new therapies.
President Robert Beall CF Foundation believes that this new society "virtual drug," a hybrid business, non-profit, is unique in the pharmaceutical industry. Her group decided to take the plunge into the drug R & D because he did not wait for drug manufacturers to small molecules to take an interest in the FC
Large pharmaceutical companies have not been drawn on the ground, Beall notes, because the number of cystic fibrosis patients that could buy a drug is relatively small - only about 30,000 in the United States. And he said that "when we tried to involve them" in the search for new compounds of interest, "they did not return our calls." Thus, the foundation has hired a consultant veterinarian for innovative small businesses; they have settled quickly Aurora, which maintains a library of 400,000 small molecules that can be screened at high speed for medical applications.
Francis Collins, director of the National Institute for Research on the human genome and co-discoverer of the CF gene, said, "This roll-up-your sleeves partnership" between an advocacy group for the disease and a drug discovery company's new "The CF Foundation is taking an interesting step. this obviously has a high risk, but could also have a strong gain if it works." By providing early support for drug discovery, Collins said, the foundation ensures that the disease "will get more attention and approaches more advanced than it would otherwise."
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