ION is a co-operative research proposal for the development of an innovative system capable of an efficient screening of candidate drugs on a wide set of targets (ion channels) involved in important neurological and psychiatric disorders, e.g. depression, Parkinson, epilepsy, migraine and pain.

The proposers are a group of SMEs which includes technological companies and end users in the pharmaceutical sector. The RTD partners are required to provide the knowledge and the research capabilities to address the selection and optimization of the cellular targets and to validate the outcomes of the system in relation to the results of in vivo models of the pathologies of interest.

However, an important contribution of the RTD partners will be to design a suite of innovative software agents for data analysis and experimental planning. The role of these agents is essential to achieve real high screening throughputs. The ION project will optimize the performance of a sequence of screening experiments instead of focusing on the execution of a single experiment.

With respect to the current state of the art, the proposed development will introduce two important innovations. First, easy access to a large set of targets and to an efficient drug discovery process, exploiting a well designed and implemented library of starting molecular structures.

Second, it will develop innovatively the analysis of the output and enable future experiments to be planned more effectively by introducing intelligent software agents interpreting the outcome of an experiment and planning the next experiment of a drug discovery screening sequence.

The proposers estimate a large market in the EU, USA and Japan for their future products due to the expanding pharmaceutical research in the considered disorders which are still an unmet medical need.

The developed pilot (libraries and software agents) will be tested and validated using an adapted version of an electrophysiology platform for the study of ion channels to be provided by one of the SMEs partners (Multi Channel Systems).

However the ION system will be able to use other well established experimental equipment already on the market, presently dominated by USA products.

The project will have an impact on several policies of the EU. Most importantly the envisaged development will address a number of priorities such as health policy (major diseases), industrial policy (innovative drugs) and economic policy (new technological products).

The proposing SMEs intend to present a common business plan in order to exploit the expected results worldwide.

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