“The NIMH then gave us a grant to establish a Vanderbilt National Cooperative Drug Discovery Group focused on discovery of new medicines for treatment of schizophrenia … giving us the funding needed to execute fully integrated drug discovery efforts aimed at fully optimizing new drug candidates for treatment of this disorder,” Conn says. “Without strong NIH support, none of these efforts would be possible.”  

 

Since Vanderbilt began its drug delivery program in 2003, building from the ground up with veteran pharma-trained drug discovery scientists, “we’ve had the expertise and time to build a team-based drug discovery effort with all the components found in pharma and with time to establish a culture and approach that allows fully integrated team-based drug discovery research,” he says.

 

At the same time, the pharmaceutical industry has undergone major downsizing because of loss of profits due to major products going off patent and the extremely high risk of drug discovery and development that is resulting in few new drug approvals, Conn says. Thus, there are not enough new products to replace those lost to patent expirations, he adds.

 

“Although the roots of the problem do not lie exclusively with pharma, we all have to take responsibility that the public trust that has been placed in us to translate advances in basic science into new medicines that clearly improve the standard of patient care,” he says. “To me, this is what we in academic drug discovery efforts are all about.”