Credit: MRCT (MRC Technology)

Last month, the UK's Medical Research Council (MRC) and its related commercialization company, MRC Technology (MRCT), opened a new center designed to expedite the discovery and development of new drugs. The MRCT Centre for Therapeutics Discovery (CTD) in London opened on 2 April.

With an initial annual operating budget of £7 million ($10 million), about 70 scientists and 10 scientific support staff will collaborate with outside researchers. They will expand on the work already done by the MRCT Drug Discovery Group, which has focused on developing medicines for diseases with substantial unmet needs. In addition to using computational and medicinal chemistry to produce drugs, scientists at the CTD will work on designing new antibody therapies. Notably, UK scientists can use the MRC's 'Developmental Pathway Funding Scheme' to fund their collaborations with the CTD while still keeping existing intellectual property ownership.

To the knowledge of those at MRC and MRCT, there are no other centers in Europe on the scale of the CTD that will “serve such a wide range of potential diseases” and provide collaboration opportunities for so many researchers, says Justin Bryans, director of Drug Discovery at the center.