NIH and Eli Lilly and Company are developing a publicly available resource to profile the effects of thousands of approved and investigational medicines. The NIH newly established National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (NCATS) and Lilly Research Laboratories are collaborating to screen the NCATS Pharmaceutical Collection of 3,800 approved and investigational medicines a comprehensive publicly available database at http://tripod.nih.gov/npc by using Lilly’s “Phenotypic Drug Discovery (PD2) panel.
The PD2 assay panel part of Lilly’s Open Innovation Drug Discovery platform at https://openinnovation.lilly.com consists of sophisticated human disease pathway-related assays relevant to cardiovascular diseases, cancer and endocrine disorders. These testing systems are designed to reveal novel mechanisms or pathway activities of drugs.
Comprehensive knowledge of the biological profiles of these medicines and molecules may enable biomedical researchers to better predict treatment outcomes, improve drug development, and lead to more specific and effective approaches.
The screening will take place over the next 12 to 18 months with results to be made available. For example if an approved medicine is found to be a possible treatment for a new disease indication then a partnership with the organization that owns the chemical compound could be formed to pursue additional studies.
These might include clinical trials required for marketing approval by the FDA. Alternatively, medicines with activity in the PD2 assays might serve as starting points for additional chemistry research efforts to produce new medicines.
“This innovative collaboration with Lilly is exactly the type of partnership that NCATS is eager to foster with many other groups from industry, government, and academia,” said NCATS Acting Director Thomas R. Insel, M.D. “Working together, we can make drug development pipelines more productive.”
