The PREVALENT initiative brings together 15 partners across 9 European countries who have joined forces to implement a novel European Research Infrastructure for pre-clinical, environmental, virtual integrative assessments, and therapeutics development.
The initiative integrates essential pre-clinical research platforms ranging from medicinal chemistry, pre-clinical evaluations of drugs using animal models, and environmental modelling to state-of-the-art bioinformatics and in silico modelling approaches.
PREVALENT is a highly interdisciplinary and inter-sectoral effort integrating knowledge, technologies, capacities and services from four relevant research areas into a one-stop-shop platform. PREVALENT will enable efficient access to the expertise, state-of-the-art facilities, data and their advanced computational analyses, disease models, research tools, and extensive training opportunities, by connecting internationally recognised centres with complementary expertise and service portfolios easily accessible for all European researchers. PREVALENT partners are recognised leaders in the fields of medicinal chemistry, mouse phenogenomics, environmental toxicology, bioinformatics and in silico modelling. Two SMEs are initially involved in the consortium with expertise in pre-clinical testing and in experimental pharmacology.
Participating institutions and companies
The initiative integrates essential pre-clinical research platforms ranging from medicinal chemistry, pre-clinical evaluations of drugs using animal models, and environmental modelling to state-of-the-art bioinformatics and in silico modelling approaches.
Why PREVALENT
Developing novel drugs is a highly interdisciplinary, time consuming and costly endeavour. To increase the chances of successfully completing the critical stage of clinical trials, eventually leading to the approval of a new drug, the selection of appropriate and predictive pre-clinical models is of utmost importance. Developing safe and efficacious drugs requires thorough pre-clinical testing using in vitro, in vivo and increasingly also in silico approaches. Due to progress made in the biomedical sciences, the number of potential biological disease modifying targets has dramatically increased but translatability of those advances into tangible health benefits seems to have decreased. Furthermore, the drug development process is highly inefficient and has very high attrition rates contributing to what has been termed the translational gap.
Despite the attempts that have been made both in academic and industry settings to mitigate this problem, the high attrition rates of drug development and the problem with translatability of pre-clinical findings to human applications remain a fact, and the return on the investments has been limited in terms of clinical impact. Thus, there is an urgent need for better and highly standardised pre-clinical approaches ensuring robustness, rigor and validity of pre-clinical research data, and for highly innovative approaches in the drug development process, including the efficient use and exploitation of robust pre-clinical data using computational models and in silico approaches.
Research infrastructures can make vital contributions to this overall challenge as generators of FAIR and reproducible data, with an intrinsically built-in quality check of the data sets that are accessible through their own portals.
Therefore, in response to the data generation and analysis challenges in pre-clinical and translational research, and to fill critical gaps in the European research infrastructures landscape, also underpinning preparedness for future pandemics, 15 partners across 9 European countries have joined forces to develop the PREVALENT initiative. PREVALENT is a highly interdisciplinary and inter-sectoral effort integrating knowledge, technologies, services and capacities from four disciplines: (1) biomedical research focusing on the pre-clinical evaluation of therapeutics, (2) medicinal chemistry, (3) environmental research, and (4) bioinformatics and in silico modelling. The PREVALENT initiative is the foundation of a novel and much needed distributed research infrastructure EUPREVIAT.