Editorial

Dear Colleague,

the Innovative Medicines Initiative (IMI) is now operative and the first call has been launched end of April. Although in the first call only little space was given directly to medicinal chemistry, there were several highly interesting topics in which a consortium definitely can benefit from the inclusion of medicinal chemists. These include the development of biomarkers and of expert systems for toxicity prediction. We should not forget that medicinal chemistry is a very broad disciplines dealing with all chemical aspects related to the design and development of medicines. IMI is also an example of how research funding might develop in the future. Throughout Europe we are facing the problem that public research funding agencies are devoting more and more money to excellence initiatives and research clusters while simultaneously cutting down the budgets for basic funding. Thus, success rates for receiving an individual research grant are sometimes below 10 – 20%. This is an enormous waste of time and intellectual capital. In his perspective, Phil Portoghese outlines the current situation in the US, where the cuts in the NIH budgets forced Universities to look for other sources on income. Medicinal chemists are beneficiaries of such efforts, as their research leads to new technologies and potential products, which might be commercialised.

With this issue we start a new series of articles devoted to the history of EFMC, written by Henk Timmerman. We highly encourage you to participate in this effort and to provide us with material, such as photos, old opinion articles or meeting reports from previous International Symposia of Medicinal Chemistry. We hope that finally we will have a complete archive of the development of EFMC which will be accessible via our web-page.

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Gerhard Ecker
Editor