The pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca comes together with UniQuest to form an “open innovation” and paves the way for the discovery of new therapeutic drugs.
The pharmaceutical
company AstraZeneca comes together with UniQuest to form an “open innovation”
and paves the way for the discovery of new therapeutic drugs. Researchers from
UniQuest, the research commercialization company of The University of
Queensland, will now have access to high-quality compounds from AstraZeneca.
The researchers will investigate human mechanisms of disease and explore
various novel target therapies and medical innovations. AstraZeneca, in turn,
will have the opportunity to deeply engage with UniQuest researchers and their
projects.
UniQuest’s drive to
expand the aim of The University of Queensland with regard to drug discovery
and development will be reinforced with this collaboration with AstraZeneca.
Dr. Dean Moss, CEO of UniQuest, stated that the initiative has been another
step towards the new era of medical discovery via open innovation and
public-private collaboration. He added that UniQuest was delighted to be
partnering with AstraZeneca in the exciting approach towards the development of
new treatments for patients and advancement of medical science in Australia.
Dr. Moss said that the
collaboration would help foster medical innovation by bringing together
complementary skills and the combined efforts of the academic innovators can
accelerate the investigation of therapeutic treatments.
UniQuest, an Australian
research commercialization company specializes in global technology transfer.
UniQuest facilitates access of world class expertise, intellectual property and
facilities at The University of Queensland, Australia, for all business
sectors. The University of Queensland is among the top 100 universities
worldwide and is a leading research and teaching institution.
Successful proposals to
investigate human mechanisms of disease and drug discovery and development can
be submitted by the UniQuest researchers. The research would be funded jointly
by UniQuest and AstraZeneca.
Dr. Ajay Gautam,
AstraZeneca’s executive director of Scientific Partnering and Alliances for
Asia Pacific, said that this collaborative drug discovery will focus on
AstraZeneca’s core therapeutic areas including oncology, metabolic,
respiratory, cardiovascular, autoimmune, inflammation, infection and neuroscience
diseases.
Dr. Gautam also said
that giving their compounds and expertise to globally leading academic research
institutions such as UniQuest, they would be opening doors to unexplored areas
of pre-clinical and clinical research to help find the next generation of
medical innovations.
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AstraZeneca is one of
the biopharmaceutical businesses which is innovation-driven with focus on the
discovery, development and commercialization of prescription medicines in
various areas of medical innovations. Its open source drug discovery program
incorporates opening the drug discovery projects to external contributors
resulting in significant increase in its research capacity. Open source drug
discovery also offers potential for developing new and inexpensive drugs to
combat diseases.
Fragment based drug
discovery, another area of research in AstraZeneca, is based on identifying
small chemical fragments that bind weakly to the biological target. These
chemicals are grown together to combine them to produce a drug that then binds
strongly to make the drug more effective.
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Both UniQuest and AstraZeneca bring
complimentary skills to foster
medical innovation. The combination of The
University of Queensland’s thought-leadership and experiences in investigating
medical hypotheses and AstraZeneca’s proven track record of drug discovery and
development can work wonders in understanding therapeutic treatments based on
human mechanisms of disease and target therapies.
Source-Medindia