SciLifeLab officially launched its much anticipated Drug Discovery and Development (DDD) program today. Two centers, one in Uppsala and one in Stockholm, will offer discovery expertise to Swedish researchers and help move new therapeutics more rapidly from the bench to the bedside.
“We believe that this will facilitate translation of existing innovative projects at Swedish universities toward therapeutic development,” says Karin Forsberg Nilsson, scientific director at SciLifeLab, and acting director for the Uppsala site of the DDD platform.
DDD will focus on early drug discovery and take promising candidates as far as demonstrating in vivo efficacy in relevant models. Through an open call for projects, Swedish academic scientists will be able to propose projects for development. When a project has reached a level of maturity and commercial value, it can then be handed off to a partner for further advancement.
Services to be offered through the eight participating facilities include recombinant protein expression and therapeutics, biochemical and cellular screening, human antibody therapeutics, hit-to-lead, lead identification chemistry, molecular interactions & structural biology, drug optimization and pharmaceutical profiling, and in vitro & systems pharmacology.
“We have already started up parts of the operation, and are now looking to recruit scientists with drug discovery and development expertise to our eight facilities,” says Per Arvidsson, platform director for the Stockholm site of the DDD platform.