“A new generation of efficient biomedical research tools”
We are a biomedical research consortium funded by the Dutch government. Twelve members are taking part in this €28 million research program. These partners include Dutch Universities, research institutes and companies. Our aim is to develop new treatments for chronic bone and joint diseases.
Who are we?
Our consortium is part of the € 100 million Smart Mix program of the Dutch government (the Ministry of Economic Affairs and the Ministry of Education, Culture and Science). The aim of the Smart Mix program is to encourage economic and cultural innovation that will enable the Netherlands to excel both nationally and internationally.
Our consortium is one of seven funded under the Smart Mix program. It is an initiative of Leiden University and 11 other partners. These include several Dutch universities, a large group of Dutch small and medium-sized enterprises and a multinational drug company. The program has a €28 million research budget distributed over eight years (2007-2015). Our main aim is to develop new medicines for chronic bone diseases, such as rheumatoid arthritis and osteoarthritis.
Our mission
In Western societies, including the Netherlands, the population is aging and showing an increasing incidence of chronic skeletal diseases. These diseases reduce the quality of life, and impose a huge drain on healthcare funds. At this moment there are only few effective treatments so there is a need to discover new medicines and treatments against those diseases. The question is how the Dutch research community and companies can address these problems given the huge costs (around €1 billion) to bring a new medicine to the market.
The Netherlands has an excellent reputation for publicly-funded biomedical research, and a dynamic private sector of small and medium-sized biotech and pharmaceutical companies. However, there are few Dutch institutions that can compete with the large resources of multinational pharmaceutical companies. We believe that the Netherlands can successfully compete in this context by developing innovative and cost-effective research systems.
Therefore, the aim of our consortium is to develop innovative biomedical research tools that will be at the service of the Dutch industry, society and the knowledge economy. The research technologies that we will develop are intended to reduce the time and money needed to discover new medicines. This will give a competitive edge to companies in the Netherlands.
Our approach
Our primary focus will be the development of a successful pipeline for the development of new drugs against bone and joint diseases. Our proposed pipeline is shown in the following figure:
Our aim is to introduce new research models in the pipeline based on zebrafish larvae instead of the expensive mammalian models. In terms of bone and joint genes, zebrafish have strong similarity with humans. Zebrafish will be used at the target discovery and compound screening stages, and together with human cell lines, will provide a filter that reduces the number of unwanted compounds reaching the very expensive later stages of development.
The Smart Mix program will provide the first opportunity in the Netherlands to combine zebrafish technologies with established pharmaceutical R&D tools and clinical trials, to create an efficient drug discovery engine. The new technologies developed by us will be licensed to provide a service platform for the pharmaceutical industry worldwide. Our consortium will develop new understanding of major human diseases, and this will benefit society and the knowledge economy.
