Seven Europe-based drug firms have announced plans to pool their research efforts together with universities and smaller companies in a project which aims to develop tomorrow’s medicines.
The European Lead Factory (ELF), backed by the EU, is backed by €196m ($265m). €80m ($107m) is being provided by the European Commission’s Seventh Framework Programme for Research (FP7), while a further €91m ($121m) will be provided by participating companies that are members of the European Federation of Pharmaceutical Industries and Associations (EFPIA). Non-EFPIA participants have provided the remaining €25m ($33m).
The project aims to drive innovation through open collaboration between big firms, which will contribute at least 300,000 chemical compounds from their in-house collections, with academia and small-to-medium enterprises, which will develop a further 200,000.
ELF aims to use the information to crowdsource techniques to develop ideas to counteract diseases, which can then be tested using collaborated pharmaceutical knowledge.
Pharmaceutical firms backing the deal include Bayer, Sanofi, AstraZeneca, Johnson & Johnson, UCB, Merck KGaA, and Lundbeck.
Academic partners include institutions in the United Kingdom, Germany, Holland, and Denmark. They are:

  • Leiden University, the Netherlands
  • Radboud University Nijmegen, the Netherlands
  • Stichting Het Nederlands Kanker Instituut, the Netherlands
  • Technical University of Denmark, Denmark
  • Universität Duisburg-Essen, Germany
  • University of Dundee, UK
  • University of Groningen, the Netherlands
  • University of Leeds, UK
  • University of Nottingham, UK
  • University of Oxford, UK
  • VU-University Amsterdam, the Netherlands

Netherlands-based non-profit TI Pharma will govern the new project. Scientific director of TI Pharma and head of screening of the European Lead Factory Ton Rijnders, said: “Establishing this public private partnership brings unprecedented opportunities to develop a sustainable ground breaking drug discovery platform based on superior input and output by connecting top notch science, decades of experience in drug discovery and development and the agility of SMEs.”