BioCentury
ARTICLE | Finance

IMI's leadoff hitter

March 29, 2012 7:00 AM UTC

Europe's Innovative Medicines Initiative has recruited 7 pharmas to each contribute up to 50,000 compounds from their proprietary libraries and is pooling the molecules into a public-private partnership called the European Lead Factory. The pharmas will have access to an expanded chemical space, and academic members of the factory will be able to run experiments with molecules that are much higher in quality than what is typically found in academia.

The five-year public-private partnership will have a €169 million ($222.2 million) budget to help build a high throughput screening center and to assemble the library. IMI hopes to designate the site of the screening center by year end and to have it up and running by early 2013...