NIH, Lilly Partner On Drug Development

Pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly & Co. and NIH’s newly created National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (NCATS) have joined forces to create a publicly available database of effects for a broad range of medicines. Over the next 12 to 18 months, Lilly will use its phenotypic drug discovery (PD2) panel to screen 3,800 approved and investigational drugs from NCATS’s pharmaceutical collection. The PD2 panel consists of various assays designed to reveal new mechanisms and drug pathways relevant to human health problems, such as cardiovascular disease, cancer, and endocrine disorders. The screening results will be made available on the pharmaceutical collection’s website. The goal of the partnership is to provide data that enable researchers to better predict treatment outcomes and create more effective medicines. “Working together, we can make drug development pipelines more productive,” said NCATS Acting Director Thomas R. Insel. “The key is precompetitive collaboration to benefit all partners, ensuring broad access to the results,” he said.