Eli Lilly and Co. has launched a Web portal to help it more easily find, evaluate and possibly license experimental drugs discovered by researchers at universities and biotechnology companies, the Indianapolis-based drugmaker announced today.
 
Lilly hopes the program behind the portal, called the Lilly Phenotypic Drug Discovery Initiative, or PD2, opens up an untapped source of ideas and drugs at a time when it has failed to come up with enough drugs to replace the revenue of its aging stars.
 
Under the PD2 initiative, Lilly offers to evaluate the structure of a drug compound for its potential effectiveness against one of four diseases: Alzheimer's, cancer, diabetes and osteoporosis.
 
If Lilly likes what it sees, it will invite the researcher to submit a physical sample of the drug, and Lilly will perform a complete biological analysis of it. Lilly promises that researchers would retain all rights to the drug. However, if a researcher asks for Lilly to perform the full biological analysis, Lilly will get first dibs on negotiating a licensing agreement for that drug.
 
"Each year, researchers throughout the world design and synthesize compounds in university and biotechnology laboratories that are never fully evaluated as potential drug candidates," said Alan D. Palkowitz, Lilly's vice president of discovery chemistry research and technologies, in a statement.
 
For more information on PD2, log onto pd2.lilly.com.