Scientists at Stanford and UC-San Francisco (UCSF) are going to collaborate at a new center to spur innovative approaches in drug development. The partnership was launched with grant funding of $3.3 million from FDA. The “UCSF-Stanford Center of Excellence in Regulatory Science and Innovation” will support FDA’s efforts to evaluate and approve safe and effective medications.
The Center will bring together scientists from the two academic institutions with partners at FDA to conduct collaborative research as well to take part in a range of education and scientific exchange programs. The programs to accelerate and improve new drug development will focus on preclinical safety and efficacy tests, clinical trials and evaluations, and harnessing diverse data sets through information sciences.
The Center based at UCSF comes at a time when the pharmaceutical and biotechnology industries are increasingly looking to tap into informatics and data driven computer models. This known as quantitative pharmacology is working to help improve drug development and identify new therapies that will be safer, more precise, and have fewer side effects.
“Data on drug action at all levels from molecular to population is exploding and requires sophisticated computational integration to fully understand it,” said Russ Altman MD, PhD, Professor of Bioengineering, Genetics, and Medicine at Stanford and Director of the university’s Biomedical Informatics Training program. “We are bringing together the best minds in therapeutics, genetics, and computational sciences to transform how drugs are made and how we can assess whether they are safe or not.”