U.S. National Institutes of Health, The Infectious Disease Research Institute and Eli Lilly and Company Announce Launch and Board of Advisors
SEATTLE, Oct. 7 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- The Lilly TB Drug Discovery
Initiative today announced its first acquisition of compounds for further
development into tuberculosis (TB) drug candidates. Agreements were reached
with Summit plc (LSE: SUMM) of Oxfordshire, UK, and the Microbial Chemistry
Research Foundation (MCRF) of Tokyo for two compounds that have shown
potential in initial testing.
The announcement marked the commencement of the Initiative's work and the
opening of new laboratories focused on early drug discovery for TB. It also
coincided with the first meeting of the non-profit organization's Board of
Advisors and Scientific Steering Committee.
The Lilly TB Drug Discovery Initiative is a public-private partnership
with the goal of filling the early-stage pipeline for future drug development.
Created in June 2007, the Initiative's primary members are Eli Lilly and
Company, the Infectious Disease Research Institute (IDRI), and the National
Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), part of the U.S.
National Institutes of Health (NIH).
'I've seen first-hand the toll that TB takes on families in all corners of
the world. People think of TB as a disease of the past, but with extensive
spread of resistance to current drugs and without rapid development of new
drugs, TB will be a disease of the future everywhere, including here in the
U.S.,' said Dr. Paul Farmer of Partners In Health and Harvard Medical School,
who sits on the Initiative's Board of Advisors.
The access this public-private Initiative has to proprietary chemical
libraries of compounds is unique. The Initiative will accelerate
identification of new clinical candidates by bringing together specialists
from around the world for the systematic exploration of vast, private
molecular libraries. It will bring together microbiologists, molecular
biologists, synthetic chemists, medicinal chemists, pharmacologists,
toxicologists, and process chemists to expedite the testing and optimizing of
early-stage compounds to fill the pipeline for drug development.
'This Initiative is founded on the belief that people from different
corners of the pharmaceutical and healthcare world will put aside differences
and come together when confronted with a global threat,' said Dr. Gail
Cassell, Lilly's vice president of scientific affairs and distinguished
research scholar. 'Our collaboration around these two compounds proves that
this belief is true.
