ROME, April 04, 2023 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- IRBM, a drug discovery and early development research institute and global contract research organization, announces that it is joining the Chemical Biology Consortium (CBC), the discovery engine of the National Cancer Institute (NCI) Experimental Therapeutics (NExT) Program, administered through the Frederick National Laboratory for Cancer Research (FNLCR), a federal national laboratory sponsored by the NCI, part of the National Institutes of Health, and currently operated by Leidos Biomedical Research, Inc. The goal of the program is to help support the translation of novel therapeutic interventions arising from academic, private or government entities into tomorrow’s anticancer therapeutics.
IRBM’s CEO Matteo Liguori said: “We are privileged to have been selected to participate in the CBC with the vital mission of progressing oncology programs globally, delivering transformational treatments for patients worldwide. We will be collaborating closely with the consortium’s network of scientists to help fuel the world’s discovery engine in the fight against cancer.”
IRBM’s Chief Science Officer Carlo Toniatti said: “We are thrilled and honoured to join other high calibre scientists as part of the CBC and support the praiseworthy mission of delivering novel anticancer drugs for rare and/or ‘orphan’ tumours. Our goals include significantly decreasing the time promising discoveries spend in drug development, reducing the failure rate, and overall accelerating novel targeted therapies into the clinic.”
IRBM’s participation in the consortium is funded through a contract to Frederick National Laboratory for Cancer Research, operated by Leidos Biomedical Research, Inc. in Frederick, Maryland. The CBC operates as a collaborative network of 19 Institutes with longstanding drug discovery know-how from target identification through to proof-of-concept clinical trials. Members contribute their expertise in high throughput screening, structural biology, medicinal chemistry, compound profiling, cancer cell biology, and in vivo & in vitro models for oncology. The research focuses on addressing unmet needs in therapeutic oncology. IRBM is the only member based outside the USA to be part of the CBC network.
CBC members are selected in five-year cycles and chosen for their knowledge and expertise in small molecule drug discovery and high-level capabilities to advance projects from target validation to clinical candidate selection.
Background information
IRBM is an innovative research organization working across all aspects of drug discovery and early development. The integrated team of seasoned researchers fosters collaborations with organizations from the pharmaceutical, biotech, non-profit and academic sectors to accelerate the development of vaccines and medicines. More than 200 scientists work at IRBM’s state-of-the-art R&D facility near Rome where projects are carried out “under one roof” enabling rapid cycle times and close integration of the scientific teams. IRBM’s scientists have discovered several marketed therapeutics, and more than 25 molecules have progressed into clinical testing.
IRBM has a strong heritage in oncology research, having supported the discovery and development of approved cancer drugs, Zejula and Zolinza®, and the advancement of several clinical candidates to oncology trials.
Precision medicines, immune checkpoint inhibitors, cell therapies, protein degraders, antibody-drug conjugates, peptide drugs and radiotheranostics are some examples of the many new drug modalities that IRBM has worked on in the fight against cancer.
For more information, please visit www.irbm.com
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