Bayer HealthCare announces new drug discovery partnership

Bayer HealthCare is allying with Leiden University to explore an innovative and promising new concept for accelerating the development of new drugs.

An international consortium called K4DD (Kinetics for Drug Discovery) is to be established to carry out research into compound binding characteristics to molecular targets, otherwise known as binding kinetics.

This is an area of high importance for eventual clinical drug efficacy, with improvements in this field likely to help prevent drug candidates that are successful in early stages of development from failing in later studies.

A 20 million euro (16.23 million pounds) funding support package will be provided by Europe's Innovative Medicines Initiative to help support the consortium.

Dr Anke Muller-Fahrnow, vice-president and head of lead discovery in Berlin at Bayer HealthCare Global Drug Discovery, said this is "an excellent example of a project in which public-private partnerships enable a collaborative research approach to tackle specific drug discovery problems of today and to come up with novel concepts".

Last week, the company announced that it has completed enrolment for the first cohort of a phase II/III trial of BAY 86-6150, its new therapy for haemophilia A and B.