Public-private partnerships to revitalize psychiatric drug discovery

Precompetitive public-private partnerships (PPPs) have the potential to improve psychiatric drug discovery by addressing gaps in the research and development pipeline such as the identification and validation of new targets, models, biomarkers and disease phenotyping. PPPs are a model to strategically bring together expertise, in-kind support and funding from multiple public and private sector partners.

This editorial describes selected case examples of established and emerging public-private consortia in the United States and Europe that provide tools, methods or resources to accelerate central nervous system (CNS) drug discovery. The authors provides a listing of public-private consortia projects that focus on the CNS, the stage of the drug discovery pipeline that they address, diseases, deliverables provided and current consortia partners.

Some of the projects undertaken by PPPs in the area of CNS drug discovery and development are beginning to make tools, resources and data publicly available. Only a few PPPs have delivered enough to extract lessons learned. These include building alignment across a wide group of stakeholders, engaging advocacy groups and funding commitments for a minimum of 5 years.