Dear Colleagues,

The Covid-19 pandemic underscores the urgent need to ensure that we are leveraging all available tools to improve patient care.

 The University of Michigan’s therapeutic pipeline, with 14 drug candidates in various stages of clinical trials, and over 130 preclinical drug discovery projects underway, holds incredible potential to improve and save lives. This past week, we announced the launch of Great Lakes Discovery, LLC through a new alliance with Deerfield Management Company to accelerate the development of many of these therapeutic innovations.

This collaboration could see as much as $130M invested in promising U-M drug development projects over the next 10 years. As part of the alliance, Deerfield will also deliver development expertise to help shepherd potential cutting-edge treatments in high-need therapeutic areas, as well as for rare diseases, with the objective of delivering more effective treatments to market.

This alliance represents years of institutional investment to support our faculty by creating a world-class drug discovery framework – and the tech transfer infrastructure to support it. We are excited to be able to spearhead this partnership with Deerfield and look forward to seeing more U-M therapeutic projects advanced to the clinic to benefit patients.

Sincerely,

Kelly B. Sexton, Ph.D.
Associate Vice President for Research – Technology Transfer and Innovation Partnerships
University of Michigan