A New Model for Academics Based Drug Discovery

Drug discovery is a complex and costly endeavor, requiring multidisciplinary know-how, interdisciplinary collaboration, tenacity, and a bit of luck. For these reasons, the search for new chemical agents to treat human disease has traditionally been undertaken only within the walls of industry. While the pharmaceutical industry is often successful where it focuses its attention, it generally focuses only on those areas that are allowed by corporate financial realities. Sadly, this means that diseases effecting small populations of patients may go untreated. As a society we should not be content with this situation and must make a priority of the development of new models that will allow and encourage drug discovery in disease areas that are neglected by pharma. In this presentation, I will describe one such model that has been established to find treatments for neurodegenerative diseases.