The rate at which newly approved drugs hit the market continues to decline rapidly against a backdrop of ever-increasing demand for better therapeutics against cancer, antibiotic resistant infection, developing world and orphan disease, and neurodegenerative and inflammatory disease, to name but a few. There is currently no consensus within the pharmaceutical industry on how this trend can be reversed, and there is a clear opportunity for academia to innovate in new approaches to drug discovery.

The Centre for Drug Discovery Science (CDDS) aims to address this challenge by nucleating critical mass within the College spanning multiple areas of science and technology of high relevance to drug discovery. By coupling pockets of expertise in scientific and technological innovation to deep expertise in disease biology and clinical need, the CDDS will seed, support and nurture pipelines of basic and translational drug discovery research.