Max Planck Innovation awarded €20M for drug discovery and development

Funding opportunity

Max Planck Innovation GmbH, the technology transfer agency of the Max Planck Society, said its Drug Discovery and Development Centre (DDC) was awarded Euro 20 million from the German Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) through its BioPharma initiative.

The funding will allow the DDC to take research projects into its Lead Discovery Centre (LDC) that have medical and commercial prospects, but are not yet mature enough to attract professional co-development partners from industry. The LDC team will advance these projects up to pharmaceutical leads with proof-of-concept in animal models.

By the end of this year, the LDC aims be working on six projects, spanning a broad range of indications including cancer and diabetes.

The second arm of the DDC, the Development Company, which is expected to start operations in the course of 2009, will take leads from the LDC into formal preclinical and clinical studies in humans. Both the LDC and the Development Company will be staffed with scientists who have industrial experience to ensure that drug discovery and development is to international pharma standards.

“The DDC represents an entirely novel approach to technology transfer in Germany,” said Jörn Erselius, CEO of Max Planck Innovation. “It is unique for a public research organisation to support the set-up of fully integrated drug discovery and development units and invest substantially into the discovery stage of high potential projects.”

“Initial LDC projects will be sourced from Max Planck Institutes. But in a second step, we are open to take on projects from various sources: universities, research organizations or industry. We are confident, that the DDC will soon become a new role model for highly efficient and professional cooperation between public research institutes and the pharmaceutical industry.”