The newly founded international consortium K4DD (Kinetics for Drug Discovery) will focus on optimizing binding kinetics for drug candidates with the goal of improving drug design. Dr. Anke Müller-Fahrnow, Vice President and Head of Lead Discovery Berlin, Bayer HealthCare Global Drug Discovery, is the coordinator and Ad P. IJzerman, professor of medicinal chemistry at the Leiden/Amsterdam Center for Drug Research of Leiden University, The Netherlands, is the academic lead of the K4DD consortium. The five-year project consists of pharma companies, universities, knowledge institutes and smaller companies from all over Europe.

Financially it is supported with 20 million Euro by Europe’s Innovative Medicines Initiative (IMI), the world’s largest public-private partnership in health.

Compound binding characteristics to its molecular target (binding kinetics) is of high importance for eventual clinical drug efficacy. However, despite the efforts in finding high-affinity and selective compounds, attrition rates of candidate drugs are still disappointingly high. Almost 90 % of clinical drug candidates that enter clinical trials still fail.
The goal of this project is that kinetic aspects of drug-target interactions can routinely be studied in robust and accessible assays for all main drug target classes within and outside the consortium. ‘Kinotypic’ knowledge should guide the identification and optimization process of drug candidates in the early phases of drug discovery in the future.

• Bayer AG, Leverkusen, Germany