What collaborations are we looking for?

Striving to perform drug discovery around innovative targets, Actar relies heavily on institutional and industrial collaborators to efficiently translate ideas generated in academic research to patient benefit.

We are looking for:

Research consortia - EU's FP6/7

Actar is classified as a small biotechnology company (SMI) based in Sweden. We have vast experience in collaborating with academic research groups, thus Actar AB is an ideal partner in FP7 calls where academic results should transfer into a drug development project. As the academic researcher provides scientific knowledge to each project, Actar is active in multiple therapeutic areas and the focus is to find small molecule ligands.

Actar AB facilitate the first critical steps in drug development for the researcher

Actar's operations enable the key steps needed to attain Proof-of-Concept for a project initiated by an academic researcher by:

• Focus on molecules with chemical characteristics suitable for early drug development

• Conduct high quality laboratory operations within method development, chemical design, and high-throughput screening of in-house chemical libraries.

Actar provides key success factors to the project:

• Screening facilities including compound libraries, robotics and analysis software
• Laboratories for compound synthesis and characterization

• Competence in medicinal chemistry, screening technologies, business development and project management

• Financial resources

Strategic alliances

Actar is owned by Karolinska Institutet, through Karolinska Development AB, and is the final step in the innovation system of Karolinska Institutet. Actar is a commercialization platform for research results and is open to researchers from all universities.

Together with Karolinska Institutet Innovations AB (for details see www.karolinskainnovations.ki.se), Actar manages and finances the first steps of the development process by offering project management, funding for patent protection, legal advice, and business development. In addition, Actar performs drug development and identifies lead compounds through high-throughput screening of low molecular weight molecule libraries in innovative and relevant model systems. The lead compounds are thereafter transferred to the pharmaceutical industry for further development into candidate drugs.

Further, Actar has close collaboration with its owner, Karolinska Development AB (for details see karolinskadevelopment.ki.se). Karolinska Development AB invests in and develops early stage life science companies, thus insuring a proximity to funding actors for Actar AB and its projects.

Company-Company collaborations

Actar are engaged in several company-company collaborations. For example, the MYC project (see pipeline for details) is a result of a fruitful collaboration with the Danish biotechnology company 2cureX (www.2curex.com).

Business networks

Today, some of Europe’s medical academic institutions have a commercialization system for bringing an idea to the market and in the end to the patient. However, very few of these institutions have a functional system for developing optimized compounds that are active against a target.

In order to optimize the transformation of European academic research results into clinical drugs Actar, together with other companies with similar business concepts, has created a European network that will focus on this transformation process.

The overall objective is to create a pan-European network that uses drug discovery to bring academic research results to the patient.