Clearly defined responsibilities in the event of a pandemic, legal certainty for immediate measures in crisis situations for scientists, more interaction between veterinary and human medicine - these are just some of the findings of the "Removing Roadblocks in Drug Development" conference on September 14. Under the leadership of the Metropolregion Hannover Braunschweig Göttingen Wolfsburg GmbH, TU Braunschweig and the Lower Saxony Innovation Center, around 50 experts discussed the topic at the Göttingen Life Science Factory.
The congress focused on the challenges of developing drugs against new pathogens in a pandemic. The participants agreed: the next pandemic is not only certain, but will also come soon. In order to be better prepared for this, a structured joint approach is needed now - before the next crisis begins - was the tenor of the three panel discussions at the specialist congress.
"The most important insight is that we need to work together with many different players in a very short space of time. And we need to practice this in the inter-pandemic times," said Prof. Dr. Michael Hoelscher, Head of the Fraunhofer ITMP Site for Immunology, Infection and Pandemic Research IIP in Penzberg/Munich. "We have learned that the availability of platform technologies and networks for manufacturing and development, as well as for clinical trial design and the execution of clinical trials, are significant and of course provide a very strong time advantage," adds Prof. Dr. Isabelle Bekeredjian-Ding, Acting Director of the Center for Pandemic Vaccines and Therapeutics (ZEPAI) at the Paul Ehrlich Institute.
Prof. Dr. Stefan Dübel, Head of the Department of Biotechnology at the Technical University of Braunschweig, also presented the RAPID Action Plan at the congress. This is intended to help speed up drug development in the future. The action plan identifies ten aspects that have slowed down drug development during the pandemic. These include, for example, slow approval processes for the promotion of scientific measures and legal uncertainty for emergency measures. At the same time, the action plan presents concrete proposals for all bottlenecks identified as to how drug development can be accelerated in future pandemics. Examples include agreed emergency funding programs, better structured approval procedures, fully developed plans for emergency measures and preparatory networking of the scientists, institutions and industry concerned in non-pandemic times. The implementation of the proposed measures is now a task for politics and administration, emphasizes Dübel: "We learned during the development of our corona drug that scientific work was slowed down by numerous non-scientific framework conditions. We need to start removing these obstacles now if we really want to be faster and save more lives in the next pandemic."
About PaPräKa and RAPID Lower Saxony:
"PaPräKa" stands for PandemicPreventionCampaigns and is a project of Metropolregion GmbH in collaboration with the Department of Biotechnology at TU Braunschweig and the Lower Saxony Innovation Center. It aims to facilitate more efficient cooperation between the relevant stakeholders in science, business and politics in the event of future pandemics. PaPräKa supports RAPID Niedersachsen (Response Against Pandemic Infectious Diseases), an initiative of the state of Lower Saxony to improve the response to future pandemics.
The PaPräKa project is funded by the Leine-Weser Regional Development Agency.
