Utrecht, 14 April 2022 – The National Growth Fund invests 325 million euros in the Oncode-PACT plan to accelerate the preclinical development process of cancer drugs. This has just been announced during the press conference by Jeroen Dijsselbloem, chairman of the National Growth Fund Committee. The committee recommends allocating the entire amount, of which 161 million euros will be awarded directly and a conditional award of 164 million euros. With this investment, Oncode-PACT will develop valuable drug candidates faster and cheaper and thus bring them to patients sooner. This will improve the quality of life of cancer patients while strengthening the future economic earning capacity of the Netherlands.
The development of a medicine takes on average 10 to 15 years, from the first scientific insights obtained in the laboratory, to the moment that patients can have access to it. However, it is a common occurrence that a drug candidate is not effective enough, or it does not reach the right patient for other reasons during this lengthy process. Low success rates due to often late failures in drug development come at the price of high investments that ultimately do not lead to new drugs for patients. The current development process of anti-cancer drugs is therefore expensive, takes too long, and usually works only for a subset of the intended target patients. Oncode-PACT aims to provide solutions to these problems.
Read the full article on the Pivot Park Screening Centre website.
