News from SGC

February 28, 2018

Open Source Drug Discovery

By: Aled Edwards and Aidan Hollis

A recent study claims that almost 1 million Canadians give up food and heat to afford prescriptions. This is just a harbinger of things to come because the current business model that drives the discovery of innovative pharmaceutical treatments requires higher and higher prices. As one example, Luxturna, a new treatment for an eye disease, is priced at a staggering $1 million per course of treatment.

Two of the largest pharmaceutical companies in Brazil, Aché Laboratories and Eurofarma Laboratories, have partnered with the Brazilian Agency for Industrial Research and Innovation (Embrapii) to fund a medicinal chemistry project at the SGC lab at UNICAMP, Campinas, SP, Brazil.

Aché and Eurofarma will each provide R$2.4M funding over six years with R$3.6M from Embrapii to form the Embrapii “Centro de Química Medicinal de Inovação Aberta” (CQMED, English: “Centre for Open Innovation Medicinal Chemistry”).

Congratulations to Professor Chas Bountra, Chief Scientist at the SGC Oxford and Professor of Translational Medicine at the Nuffield Department of Medicine and who has been appointed OBE for services to Translational Medical Research in the UK's New Year's Honours List 2018.

Oxford researchers call for a new Pharmaceutical Commons

Pharmaceutical research and development (R & D) is one of the best examples of human ingenuity, attracting vast funding, employing brilliant minds, and deploying the most advanced technologies. Over the past century, it has enabled unprecedented advances for human health. Yet the pharmaceutical R & D system is struggling to keep up with society’s medical needs. High failure rates and prolonged research timelines for candidate drugs constitute a human tragedy, and have dramatically increased the cost of drug discovery over the last decades.  More and better medicines are desperately needed at a time of global...