10.07.2008 - 11:47am ET

(CSRwire) SEATTLE, Oct. 7 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- The Lilly TB Drug Discovery Initiative today announced its first acquisition of compounds for further development into tuberculosis (TB) drug candidates. Agreements were reached with Summit plc (LSE: SUMM) of Oxfordshire, UK, and the Microbial Chemistry Research Foundation (MCRF) of Tokyo for two compounds that have shown potential in initial testing.

The announcement marked the commencement of the Initiative's work and the opening of new laboratories focused on early drug discovery for TB. It also coincided with the first meeting of the non-profit organization's Board of Advisors and Scientific Steering Committee.

The Lilly TB Drug Discovery Initiative is a public-private partnership with the goal of filling the early-stage pipeline for future drug development. Created in June 2007, the Initiative's primary members are Eli Lilly and Company, the Infectious Disease Research Institute (IDRI), and the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), part of the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH).

"I've seen first-hand the toll that TB takes on families in all corners of the world. People think of TB as a disease of the past, but with extensive spread of resistance to current drugs and without rapid development of new drugs, TB will be a disease of the future everywhere, including here in the U.S.," said Dr. Paul Farmer of Partners In Health and Harvard Medical School, who sits on the Initiative's Board of Advisors.

The access this public-private Initiative has to proprietary chemical libraries of compounds is unique. The Initiative will accelerate identification of new clinical candidates by bringing together specialists from around the world for the systematic exploration of vast, private molecular libraries. It will bring together microbiologists, molecular biologists, synthetic chemists, medicinal chemists, pharmacologists, toxicologists, and process chemists to expedite the testing and optimizing of early-stage compounds to fill the pipeline for drug development.

"This Initiative is founded on the belief that people from different corners of the pharmaceutical and healthcare world will put aside differences and come together when confronted with a global threat," said Dr. Gail Cassell, Lilly's vice president of scientific affairs and distinguished research scholar. "Our collaboration around these two compounds proves that this belief is true. We are encouraged by the response and inspired by the commitment of our colleagues."

Over the past year, The Lilly TB Drug Discovery Initiative has organized operations and labs and identified compounds for the first round of work. Within the next few months, it plans to begin high-throughput screening of new, validated targets against well-characterized chemical libraries.

In addition to screening activities, the Initiative will study the potential of the newly acquired compounds from MCRF and Summit plc:

• MCRF has discovered CPZEN-45, an early stage clinical candidate which may have a new mechanism of action against TB, and also shows efficacy against multidrug-resistant and extensively drug resistant TB infected mice without any detectable side effect so far examined.
  
• Summit plc's compounds also show significant potential as a new class of antibiotics for treatment of TB and will be further explored by the Initiative.

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