The Cambridge-MIT Institute (CMI), a partnership between the University of Cambridge in Cambridge, England, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, Massachusetts, has said that it is funding a transatlantic next-generation drug discovery community in order to bring together experts from both institutions, as well as partners in the biotech, pharmaceutical and IT industries.

CMI hopes that this initiative, of bringing together scientific experts and IT professionals, will allow them to share their knowledge and collaborate in speeding up the discovery of next generation drugs for complex diseases such as cancer, diabetes and arthritis.

CMI will make a total investment of around £6 million toward research. It will also earmark extra funds towards creating new masters and undergraduate degree programs at their institutions and invest in IT systems as well.

The Community aims at taking a new multidisciplinary "systems biology" approach to drug discovery. The computation models that CMI will use, in its analysis of the data from experiments on multiple gene and protein properties, will help the Community predict which drugs, dosages and treatments will be the most effective for certain types of patients. According to CMI this is expected to spur the development of more personalized medicine.

Through "systems biology" CMI will seek to approach the incredible complexity of the human body in a more holistic way rather than in the conventional "one gene, one protein, one drug," mode. This kind of analysis would require a lot of number crunching with high computer capacities and memory.

The initiative is kicking off with two research projects: one to study adult blood stem cells, in order to test the efficacy and toxicity of drugs on human physiology, and the other to establish new computational methods for identifying drug targets from human gene and protein-level data.

The Next-Generation Drug Discovery Community is part of an overall strategy by CMI to create knowledge integration communities which aim to push forward research by uniting academic and industry groups.