ADDC and AstraZeneca announce third year of Screening Partnership

BALTIMORE, Aug. 10, 2016 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- The Academic Drug Discovery Consortium (ADDC) announced today the third call for proposals from its partnership with AstraZeneca. This partnership facilitates efforts by researchers from academia to discover novel compounds with the potential to become new patient treatments. This partnership provides ADDC members with access to high quality compound libraries and allows AstraZeneca the opportunity to collaborate with academic researchers to identify novel disease targets and drugs across different therapy areas.

Click here to learn more about the partnership

The selected proposals will receive access to up to 250,000 compounds from AstraZeneca's internal screening libraries in addition to a small amount of funding. Three specific libraries are available for collaboration:

• A 250,000 diversity set which provides a broad representation of AstraZeneca's industry-leading compound collection.
• A 13,000 annotated set covering 1200 human targets with at least 100 nM potency at the primary target.
• A low molecular weight fragment screening set of 17,000 compounds.

Proposals must be submitted by members of the ADDC and respond through the Request for Proposals (RFP) process. Responses will be judged by a Technical Review Committee consisting of AstraZeneca and ADDC members. AstraZeneca may provide financial or material support to selected projects.

Seven proposals were selected over the last two years – hits from the first few screens are being evaluated for a follow-up collaboration.

Additional information on this project, eligibility requirements, and the Call for Proposals can be found at www.addconsortium.org. Proposals are due Oct 31st, 2016. Proposals selected by the Review Committee will be announced in December 2016.

About the Academic Drug Discovery Consortium

ADDC was established in 2012 and currently comprises over 140 university-led drug discovery centers and about 1600 individual members from 41 countries. The ADDC's mission is to nurture academic drug discovery centers and build a collaborative network to facilitate the exchange of expertise, and the formation of partnerships. For more information, visit www.addconsortium.org or contact Dr. Barbara Slusher, founder and President of ADDC, and Director, Johns Hopkins Drug Discovery ([email protected]) or Matthew Hartman, Director, ADDC ([email protected]).

About AstraZeneca

AstraZeneca is a global, innovation-driven biopharmaceutical business that focuses on the discovery, development and commercialization of prescription medicines, primarily for the treatment of cardiovascular, metabolic, respiratory, inflammation, autoimmune, oncology, infection and neuroscience diseases. AstraZeneca operates in over 100 countries and its innovative medicines are used by millions of patients worldwide. For more information please visit: www.astrazeneca.com or contact David Smith, Principal Scientist, AstraZeneca ([email protected]).

SOURCE Academic Drug Discovery Consortium