Max Planck Innovation opens drug discovery centre

Development opportunities

Max Planck Innovation GmbH, the technology transfer agency of the Max Planck Society, opened a new subsidiary, the Lead Discovery Center GmbH (LDC), based in Dortmund, Germany.

LDC will take on promising projects from public research and advance them through the drug discovery process up to pharmaceutical leads ready for preclinical and clinical studies. The centre will focus on common diseases including cancer, diabetes, neurodegenerative diseases, cardiovascular and other conditions where there is unmet medical need.

Initial projects will be sourced from Max Planck institutes, but the LDC remains open to work on projects from other public research organisations or industry.

“We have been working intensely with industry experts and investors to come up with a new, commercially viable concept to support the development of novel medicines in Germany,” Matthias Stein-Gerlach, LDC Project Leader at Max Planck Innovation comments. “It is with great confidence that we now open the LDC and hand it over to the excellent starting team we have been able to assemble over the last months.”

LDC will bring biology, medicinal chemistry, and pharmacology expertise under the umbrella of professional project management to generate drug candidates attractive to the biopharmaceutical industry for in-licensing or co-development. Until LDC can generate its own revenues from agreements with industry, it will be financed from a variety of sources, including project-based funding from the Max Planck Society, government subsidies, and donations.

“The LDC provides for a new level of quality in early drug development,” said Bert Klebl, CEO. “For the first time, we will be able to select the most promising findings from public research and develop them in line with international industry standards up to initial proof-of-concept without being limited by typical investment rules.”

“Because regular investment cycles are comparatively short and standard tools for the evaluation of risks and returns are inapplicable to early stage [discovery], many compelling projects have run out of money in recent years regardless of their medical and commercial opportunity. The new, sustainable approach followed by the LDC will help overcome the bottle-neck in drug development, and I am excited to be part of it.”

The LDC forms part of Max Planck Innovation’s Drug Development Center (DDC) that was selected for the final round of the BioPharma strategy competition for medicine of the future, a support programme of the German Ministry of Education and Research.