GOT-IT

GOT-IT – Guidelines on Target Validation for Innovative Therapeutics within the BMBF funded consortium project: Target validation for pharmaceutical drug compound development

Continuous biomedical research and development of new drug compounds contribute to the maintenance of good medical care through innovative therapies. The basis for the development of these new drug compounds is the identification of disease-modulating molecules, so called targets. This kind of research is usually conducted at academic institutions.

The validation of these molecules based on solid quality criteria is a pivotal step for the development of potential new drug compounds, before they can be considered by industry for use in clinical studies. However, the translation of basic research findings into new therapeutics is a major challenge for the biomedical research community, due to a) the lack of publicly available recommendations that are dedicated specifically to target validation in an academic setting, and b) different quality needs and expectations in academia versus industry.

The GOT-IT Project will support academia-industry interactions by aligning quality criteria in pre-clinical research in form of Target Validation Guidelines. For this, GOT-IT will:

1. analyse current target validation practices and identify gaps between academic and industrial target validation projects;
2. develop a fit-for-purpose, flexible set of guidelines on robust target validation suitable for implementation in academic as well as industrial settings;
3. refine the guidelines through communication with the individual Target Validation Teams in the BMBF consortium and with a broad research community; and
4. facilitate dissemination and sustainability of the guidelines by means of an educational program and an Online Expert Platform.

With the resulting Target Validation Guidelines, GOT-IT aims to offer recommendations to the scientific community in order to improve data robustness and reproducibility as well as rigour in pre-clinical research, thereby increasing the effectiveness of translating biomedical research into drug discovery.

The GOT-IT Project is carried out in collaboration with the Translational Drug Validation and Preclinical Disease Models group at the Fraunhofer Institute for Molecular Biology and Applied Ecology (IME-TMP) in Frankfurt a.M., and with PAASP (Partnership for Assessment and Accreditation of Scientific Practice) GmbH in Heidelberg.

You can find more information on the GOT-IT project on the GOT-IT Homepage. 

The BIH press release can be found here.

The publication of the project results can be found here.