As part of its “Major Instrumentation Initiative”, the German Research Foundation (DFG) has awarded Darmstadt University of Applied Sciences funds of €1m for an initial period of three years for an interdisciplinary drug research project. The aim of the project is to explore more sustainable strategies for the discovery, development and production of new drugs.

The development of new drugs – starting with the identification of potential active ingredients through to the authorisation of the finished product – consumes enormous amounts of energy, water and medical products. To make drug research more resource-friendly, an h_da consortium led by biochemist Professor Heinz Neumann aims to analyse and improve all stages of the process. To this end, the German Research Foundation (DFG) is financing the purchase of an automated, high-resolution fluorescence microscope, which the team will use to develop new strategies for identifying active substances and to assess biomolecular condensates systematically. This latter work should contribute to a better understanding of cellular and thus also of disease processes.

In this way, the researchers hope to find new active ingredients that are more effective and to explore strategies for optimising production processes. They will examine pharmaceutical substances that have already been approved to see whether they might also be effective against other diseases and could therefore be authorised for other medical conditions. Drug candidates that were “rejected” in earlier clinical trials will be reevaluated and improved so that they can be used as appropriate; this would make several stages of the complex development process superfluous.