Medical progress and continued supply of innovative medicines can only be guaranteed by continuous research and development of new active drugs and therapeutics. The most important starting point for the identification of new drugs are disease-modifying targets. Thus, the proper validation of pharmaceutically relevant targets based on defined quality criteria is a key criterion for biomedical research.
The goal of the GOT-IT consortium, formed by Prof. U. Dirnagl (Department of Experimental Neurology, Charité and Berlin Instiute of Health, BIH), Prof. M. Parnham (Fraunhofer IME-TMP) and PAASP, is to investigate industrial target validation procedures, to analyse the conditions for implementing these industrial standards in an academic environment, and to develop guidelines for robust and efficient target validation. These guidelines will be published in an open-access and peer-reviewed journal and made available to academic groups and research institutions.
The BMBF funding scheme also supports several lab-based R&D projects focusing on target validation for different indications and in different therapeutic areas. The GOT-IT team will work in close collaboration with these R&D projects and will incorporate any real-life experiences and recommendations into the development of the GOT-IT guidelines, thereby increasing fit-for-purpose and practicability aspects of the guidelines.
The project addresses the problem that, due to a lack of proper validation standards, initial basic research findings (drug targets) often fail to be transferred into further drug development programs. In the future, the GOT-IT guidelines will support the validation process of novel drug targets and will facilitate adherence with industrial standards, thereby increasing competitiveness of academic target validation projects. This will hopefully allow academic innovations to reach patients faster and more effectively.

For more information, please visit the GOT-IT homepage LINK

This is the link to the GOT-IT homepage on the Berlin Institute of Health site LINK

General background information and information about the different target validation research group can be found on the website from the BMBF LINK