European projects team up in novel drug discovery

The European Lead Factory, one of the projects supported by Lygature, has accepted an application from another project in the Lygature portfolio – the PDE4NPD project – to screen for novel drug discovery starting points. The PDE4NPD project aims to develop novel drugs for tropical neglected diseases such as Human African trypanosomias (sleeping sickness) and American trypanosomias (Chagas disease).

This important crossover between the two Lygature supported projects gives an important boost to developing new drugs for unmet medical needs.

Earlier this year, the European Lead Factory lowered the entry-cost for not-for-profit drug discovery programmes in the area of neglected tropical diseases. For drug target programmes relating to the pathogens on the WHO list of neglected tropical diseases, clinical or diagnostic milestone payments will be waived, thereby freeing charities and other organizations from financial burden in their pursuit of new therapies for patients in the world’s least developed countries.

The PDE4NPD project did not hesitate to submit a high quality proposal. The project focuses on cyclic nucleotide phosphodiesterases (PDEs), which are validated drug targets for many non-communicable diseases. Research has demonstrated that these PDEs also play a role in the life cycle of many parasites that cause tropical diseases. Within the PDE4NPD project, an assay was developed that allows for high-throughput screening of compounds against one of these parasite PDEs. The project partners successfully submitted the proposal to the European Lead Factory.

Picture courtesy of the Wellcome Images Collection

Now that the application has been accepted, the PDE4NPD project, represented by the VU University Amsterdam, and the European Lead Factory will form a program team to ensure optimal planning, transfer and execution of the screen and hit selection. Once the PDE4NPD team provides a set of parasite PDE targets, the European Lead Factory will screen the 460,000 compounds in the Joint European Compound Library to find out if there are compounds that inhibit the targets. These hits could be the first starting points for novel drug discovery.

Results of four years European Lead Factory
The European Lead Factory is a public-private partnership, established in 2013 with IMI funding. The project provides a unique platform for translation of innovative biology and chemistry into high quality starting points for drug discovery. The European Lead Factory combines an exceptional collection of small molecules within the Joint European Compound Library with an infrastructure for high throughput screening. The public-private partnership has so far resulted in the production of more than 130,000 novel compounds for the library, additional to the 330,000 compounds that were made available by participating pharmaceutical companies. With these unique resources, the European Lead Factory aims to facilitate breakthroughs in drug discovery to satisfy unmet medical and societal needs.

Antimicrobial Resistance
In addition to accelerating drug development for neglected diseases, the European Lead Factory contributes to solutions for antimicrobial resistance. With the help of results and hit compounds delivered by the European Lead Factory, the University of Oxford (UK) is taking the next steps in targeting antimicrobial resistance. In collaboration with the IMI-project ENABLE, the compounds developed at the European Lead Factory will be further progressed towards clinical phase.