BIOBASE, a leading provider of knowledge solutions for the life sciences industry, announced that they have received a European Union research contract to develop innovative technology to analyze complex disease mechanisms. The three-year, 3 million Euro project, called Net2Drug, will be coordinated by BIOBASE and developed as a collaboration with several international participants. The projects goal is to create a sophisticated “toolbox” integrating cutting edge bioinformatics, chemoinformatics, and experimental methods to identify potential therapeutic targets.

“Understanding the mechanism of disease is the key to rationalizing drug development. Net2Drug will provide a knowledge-based approach for identifying critical components in the gene regulatory network that accounts for a specific disease,” explains Prof. Edgar Wingender, President and CSO of BIOBASE, “This approach will enable researchers to confidently select promising drug targets and efficiently identify chemical compounds directed against these targets”.

Dr. Alexander Kel, Senior Vice President Research & Development at BIOBASE and project coordinator adds: “Net2Drug will integrate different ‘omics’ datasets such as proteomics and genomics into cohesive networks to facilitate comprehensive understanding of complex human pathologies. Proof-of-concept will be given by applying our technology on certain tumor types, in particular *** cancer.”

The International Net2Drug Consortium

The Net2Drug consortium includes BIOBASE GmbH (Germany) as coordinator, Progenika Biopharma S.L. (Spain), University of Helsinki (Finland), Fraunhofer Institute für Toxikologie und Experimentelle Medizin (Germany), University of Göttingen/Medical School (Germany), Institute of Systems Biology, Ltd, Novosibirsk (Russia), Institute of Biomedical Chemistry of Russian Academy of Medical Sciences, Moscow (Russia) Microbiology and Tumor Biology Center (MTC), Karolinska Institute (Sweden), and the CNR-ITB Institute of Biomedical Technologies (Italy).

The European Union’s Sixth Framework Programme (FP6)

Life Sciences, Genomics and Biotechnology for Health is one of seven top priorities of the European Union’s Sixth Framework Programme (FP6). The FP6 objective is to help Europe take advantage of unprecedented opportunities for generating new knowledge and translating it into applications that enhance human health. To this end, fundamental and applied research is supported, with an emphasis on integrated, multidisciplinary, and coordinated efforts addressing the present fragmentation of European research and increase the competitiveness of the European biotechnology industry.

The indicative budget is EUR 2514 million for the period 2002-2006, including up to EUR 475 million for cancer-related research.