Call for Proposals - Target Development Fund.

More details of the fund and its activities are outlined in the full call below.

If you have a project that you would be interested in progressing within the Target Development Fund further information on how to apply is available at www.tppgd.com or contact Dr Barry McGuinness at targetdevelopmentfund@tppgd.com. Or for an informal discussion please contact Paul Wyatt, at p.g.wyatt@dundee.ac.uk or 01382 386231.

The closing date for applications is 18 November 2011.

Target Development Fund seeks proposals for the translation of novel drug targets or leads into commercial drug discovery and development projects.

The Target Development Fund has been set up with the support of TPP Global Development (TPP), the Scottish Funding Council (SFC) and the University of Dundee to enable the development of drug discovery opportunities into the therapeutics of tomorrow. The activities of the fund will centre around the UK’s leading academic centre for drug discovery and development, the University of Dundee’s Drug Development Unit (DDU). The Target Development Fund’s call for project opens 18 October 2011, targeting the most exciting ideas from universities and research institutes worldwide (for application details see www.tppgd.com).

The fund will support the translation of world-class life sciences research into early phase drug discovery and development projects that address a clear unmet medical need. The data packages generated around these projects will demonstrate the appropriate disease model-based validation required to make them highly attractive to potential licensing partners from within the pharmaceutical industry.

TPP is a UK-based biotech company specialising in commercialisation of preclinical drug development programmes. TPP collaborates with universities and research institutes to translate novel ideas from academic labs to the late-stage preclinical / proof-of-concept phase of drug development. TPP has a team of exceptional scientists with a long track record of commercial drug development success in large Pharmaceutical companies, with particular expertise in high-throughput screening (HTS) assay development, medicinal chemistry and in vivo disease models. The Target Development Fund fuses TPP’s core competencies to the DDU’s extensive resources in medicinal chemistry, DMPK, molecular pharmacology, computational chemistry and structural biology. 

Given the pressures imposed by the current funding environment the application process has been streamlined as far as possible. To expedite this process, TPP and the University of Dundee have set up their collaboration such that the university or research institute from which a project originates need only engage with a single party, TPP, to come to a commercial agreement.

If you have an idea or discovery that you believe has commercial potential and could benefit from the funding and expertise provided by the Target Development Fund then we would be delighted to hear from you. The closing date for applications is 18 November 2011. Please complete the attached Preliminary Project Proposal Form and send to the email address listed below. Please DO NOT include any unpublished or confidential information at this stage.