The new dedicated web-based platform is designed to make it easy for scientists to access AstraZeneca’s Open Innovation programmes, which include:
- Clinical Compound Bank of patient-ready ‘live’ and discontinued small molecule compounds and biologics that have shown in clinical trials evidence of human target coverage and tolerability. These are being offered for novel clinical and translational research.
- Pharmacology Toolbox, which comprises compounds with optimised pharmacological properties. These compounds are being made available for preclinical research to explore novel disease biology and advance scientific knowledge.
- Target Innovation collaborations to enable investigators to validate novel molecular, drug targets, which could include the availability of high throughput screening capabilities.
- New Molecule Profiling via advanced cheminformatic capabilities to explore the properties and therapeutic innovation potential of new molecules.
- A new R&D Challenge programme through which researchers can suggest solutions to specific R&D challenges faced by AstraZeneca scientists in ongoing projects.
- A Suggestion Box for researchers to offer, and be rewarded for, broader innovative ideas and solutions to ongoing challenges.
Mene Pangalos, Executive Vice-President, Innovative Medicines and Early Development at AstraZeneca, said:
"To push the boundaries of science and deliver new medicines to patients, we need to create a more permeable research environment, collaborating with academia, industry and government. Discovery of good science requires us all to work in more open and creative ways – an essential part of that is making our knowledge and compounds more accessible. I’m excited about this new initiative which will help us to engage with researchers who share our passion for the potential of developing life-changing medicines through pioneering science."
Don Frail, Vice President, Emerging Innovations, Scientific Partnering and Alliances, AstraZeneca, said:
"Through this new site, scientists around the world can submit proposals, ranging from early idea evaluation through to clinical validation studies in what we believe is one of the broadest open innovation platforms in the industry."
Partnering and collaborations are a key part of AstraZeneca’s strategy to achieve scientific leadership, in particular in its core therapeutic areas of oncology, cardiovascular and metabolic disease and respiratory and autoimmune diseases. The company’s existing open innovation collaborations range from compound-sharing to advanced research into treatments for neglected diseases, pre-clinical collaborations to source and validate new compounds against a range of targets, and collaborations in which risks and rewards of drug development programmes are shared among many partners. Recent examples include: a collaboration with the Medical Research Council (MRC) in the UK to share compounds with academic researchers, partnerships with the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the National Research Program for Biopharmaceuticals (NRPB) in Taiwan.
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