Lilly announces their Phenotypic Drug Discovery Initiative (PD2) – a program to screen compounds for FREE

More than 90 institutions around the world, including the University of Nebraska/Lincoln, are currently participating in a new drug discovery initiative recently launched by Eli Lilly and Company to discover and develop potential new medicines to treat Alzheimer's disease, cancer, diabetes and osteoporosis. Named the Lilly Phenotypic Drug Discovery Initiative, or PD2, the program uses disease-relevant assays developed by Lilly scientists and a secure Web portal to evaluate the therapeutic potential of compounds designed and synthesized in university and biotechnology laboratories around the globe.

"Each year, researchers throughout the world design and synthesize compounds in university and biotechnology laboratories that are never fully evaluated as potential drug candidates," says Alan D. Palkowitz, Ph.D., vice president of discovery chemistry research and technologies at Lilly. "There's an untapped source of ideas and compounds in the greater scientific community that could ultimately impact patients' lives following further evaluation and development."

The PD2 initiative is designed to expand opportunities for potential innovation by providing global researchers a more convenient point of entry into Lilly's drug discovery and development process. While academia, biotech and pharma have been collaborating for decades, those collaborations typically involve specific researchers, institutions or companies. PD2 opens the door to global researchers who may not have a relationship with Lilly, or with any pharmaceutical maker.

Through the PD2 portal, researchers may confidentially submit a structure of their compound for an initial computational evaluation using a set of proprietary Lilly algorithms focused on drug-like properties and structural novelty. If the compound structure meets certain specified criteria, Lilly will ask for a physical sample, still confidential, for biological testing across assay modules in Alzheimer's disease, cancer, diabetes and osteoporosis (additional disease state assays will likely be added). Throughout the entire process of cheminformatics analysis and biological testing, the structure of the compound is not revealed to Lilly scientists. In addition, all testing by Lilly is free, and all intellectual property rights remain with the submitting researcher and/or institution throughout the entire process.

In return for conducting the work and providing the data -- data which constitutes broader assessments of a compound's biological profile than what is generally available today in academic or government laboratories -- Lilly retains first rights to negotiate a collaboration or licensing agreement with the submitters. Importantly, if no such agreement is reached within a defined time period, the external researcher is granted no-strings-attached ownership of the data report and can choose to use it in publication or grant proposals, or to further refine structural hypotheses, all of which may advance scientific discovery.

In addition to the University of Nebraska/Lincoln, participating sites in the United states include Harvard University, Stanford University, Princeton University, Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center and Indiana University-Purdue University. Participating sites outside of the United States include the University of Syndey (Australia), National University of Singapore and the University of Postdam (Germany).

"We're incredibly pleased with the response thus far," said Palkowitz. "PD 2 is a "win-win-win" in that external researchers gain new insights into their compounds, Lilly becomes connected to an untapped global source of ideas and compounds, and, patients may ultimately be helped one day by new medicines discovered and developed as part of this collaborative-based initiative."

For more information on PD2, please log onto pd2.lilly.com.