Drug firms join forces to boost discovery pipeline

Nature online reports that pharmaceutical giants Merck, Pfizer and Eli Lilly have joined forces in a start-up company that they hope will stimulate drug discovery:

"Boston-based ‘Enlight Biosciences’ will develop lab technologies to the 'pre-competitive' stage, so that each company will be able to use them to take its own research forward. The firm's leaders include a coalition of drug-development and academic researchers, such as Robert Horvitz, a Nobel laureate biologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge.

Enlight will focus on areas such as imaging technologies, toxicology studies and speeding up the synthesis of interesting compounds. Relatively little money has been committed so far, just US $39 million has been announced to target these areas and many more."