“We have all the divisions that would exist in a big pharma,” says Karimah Es Sabar, founding chair of the alliance and president and CEO of the Vancouver, Canada–based Centre for Drug Research and Development (CDRD). In addition to CDRD, founding members are Lead Discovery Center (LDC), of Dortmund, Germany, The Scripps Translational Science Institute, in Jupiter, Florida, The Leuven, Belgium–based Centre for Drug Design and Discovery, and the Medical Research Council Technology and Cancer Research Technology, both in London.
All members have a strong track record of startup creation and partnering with drug developers. Es Sabar says alliance members have collectively founded more than 30 companies and taken more than 20 drugs to market already. “We can do all the work required to make projects investible,” she says. “And we can do it in the most efficient way.”
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