Untried drug candidates can find a home at Japan's newly minted AMED

Print 02 June 2015
EJ Lane / FeircePharmaAsia

Are you a drugmaker with a lot of untried substances hanging around in your closet of drugs? Has Japan's AMED got a deal for you.

The Japan Agency for Medical Research and Development, created less than two months ago in the model of the U.S. NIH, is now ready to receive up to 200,000 substance samples from more than 10 drugmakers.

In exchange for providing the substances free of charge, AMED said it would work with universities and other researchers to test a substance's use in treating various diseases and ailments, such as cancer and infection.

AMED recently began taking applications from domestic and foreign pharmaceutical companies that offered from 5,000 to 30,000 candidates each to be researched.

When that research demonstrates a substance is a potential treatment, the substance and research work would be returned to the pharma donor to be developed into a profitable drug.

According to the Japan News, AMED may have to restrict the number of drugs one drugmaker can offer to the program if it would otherwise be overwhelmed by pharmas offering as many as 30,000 substances to be tested.

The newspaper also said the global industry was believed to have many substances that never see the light of day because of the time and expense involved in conducting research and performing compatibility analyses on them.

Japan's Science and Technology Research Partnership for Sustainable Development has been working with AMED and other groups to simplify the research program by selecting from among the proffered substances the ones to be given priority.

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