Brussels, 03/08/2004 (Agence Europe) - The French Alliance for Rare Diseases, laboratories and research institutes have just launched two new initiatives aimed at stepping up the development of treatments for orphan diseases, which affect 20 million people in Europe.
The first initiative, christened OrphanXchange, aims to promote partnerships between academic research structures and private companies to develop diagnostic solutions and orphan drugs. It relies on a database which is free and accessible to all and already contains projects for around fifty rare diseases. OrphanXchange is a program developed by Inserm with support from the 6th Community framework programme for research and the LEEM, the French Pharmaceutical Companies Association. (http://www.orphanxchange.org )
The second initiative is called ERDITI (European Rare Diseases Initiative), and it aims to offer researchers access to existing pharmaceutical compounds for further investigation in the field of rare diseases. To date, only four laboratories (Aventis, Glaxosmithkline, Roche and Servier) have agreed to make their compounds available. A call for proposals has been launched for researchers to present projects which could use these compounds. If selected by a scientific committee under the aegis of the European Science Foundation, the projects will be sent to laboratories which, if they play along, will research whether one of their compounds could correspond to one of the projects and if so, make it available to researchers. ERDITI is coordinated by the French Institute for Rare Diseases Research with the support of the Pharmaceutical Companies Association. (http://www.erditi.org )