Fundación MEDINA (MEDicamentos INnovadores en Andalucía) is one of the high throughput screening centers of EU-OPENSCREEN-ERIC, the new infrastructure officially announced on March 21, 2018 by the European Official Journal of the EU as European Research Infrastructure (ERIC), a transnational infrastructure established after an extensive selection process by the members countries and the European Research Forum for Research Infrastructures (ESFRI).
EU-OPENSCREEN is a consortium of 24 research organizations involving screening and chemistry centers from seven funding member states (the Czech Republic, Finland, Germany, Latvia, Norway, Poland and Spain) and one international research organization (EMBL). Under the coordination of the Berlin central office (Leibniz-Institut für Molekulare Pharmakologie, FMP), EU-OPENSCREEN integrates a network of high capacity screening centers and a library of 140.000 commercial compounds. EU-OPENSCREEN main objective is the establishment of a research infrastructure responding to the needs of European academic institutes, biotech companies and industry, looking forward to advance research in chemical biology and promote drug discovery. EU-OPENSCREEN offers the access to a network of European leading screening platforms and medicinal chemistry centers and to a common compound library.
As funding member state, Spain contributes with three screening center nodes including, in addition to FUNDACIÓN MEDINA in Granada, the Centro de Investigación Príncipe Felipe in Valencia (CIPF), and the Universidad de Santiago de Compostela (USC).
FUNDACIÓN MEDINA is one of the high capacity screening centers in Europe, and an international reference for the discovery of new drugs from microbial natural products. FUNDACIÓN MEDINA has been pioneering an innovative public-private collaboration model for the research and development of new drugs from the partnership established in 2008 between the Andalousian Government, The University of Granada and Merck Sharp and Dohme de España S.A. FUNDACIÓN MEDINA drug discovery platform has its origins in the former MSD Basic Research Center, and owns one of the largest and most diverse microbial collections (190.000 strains) and natural product libraries (200.000 samples) with a long list of successful new drug candidate discoveries of the pharma sector. Fundación MEDINA is in addition a Node of the Spanish Network for Drug Discovery (REDEFAR) operating under the USC coordination and MINECO funding. Fundación MEDINA develops research programs focused on new drugs for infectious diseases (including tuberculosis and tropical diseases), cancer and neurodegenerative diseases as well as new metabolomic biomarkers, and has established collaboration agreements with more than 50 research centers and companies of the pharma and biotechnology sectors.
Olga Genilloud, Fundación MEDINA Scientific Director, emphasizes “the relevance of this new infrastructure for Spanish members to foster new collaborations with research teams supporting cell biology and target validation research and new opportunities in the field of drug discovery”. “As members of this new infrastructure, Fundación MEDINA will help to bring Andalucía into the European reference networks in the field and will promote the access of the Andalusian scientific community to the strategic research and platforms involved in the discovery of new drugs and other high value biotechnology products in agrofood, cosmetics, and bioenergy”.
