MAJ Institute of Pharmacology
The Jerzy Maj Institute of Pharmacology Polish Academy of Sciences (IF PAN) is one of the leading scientific units in the country. It performs basic scientific research in pharmacology, neuroscience, medicinal chemistry and phytochemistry. As a result of the evaluation of quality and scientific activity, IF PAN was awarded the highest possible category A+ in the discipline of pharmaceutical sciences and category A in the discipline of medical sciences, in the field of medical and health sciences in 2022. The priorities in the activities of IF PAN are the development and high scientific competence of its staff, very high standards of education of young researchers and international and national research cooperation, both with scientific centres and with industry. IF PAN has an excellently prepared staff with many years of experience and outstanding achievements in the field of experimental neuropsychopharmacology and neurobiology.
In the years 2019-2023, IF PAN has received funding for more than 80 basic research grants, financed from national funds by the National Centre for Sciences,i amounting to more than PLN 50 million, as well as a number of grants carried out in cooperation with industry, financed by NCBiR. The results of the research conducted at IF PAN are mainly scientific publications, implementations and patents. In recent years, nearly 600 original articles have been published (all from the JCR list), including over 50 papers published in international journals with a high impact factor (between 7.0 and 19.0).
CEPHARES CENTER
Consistent implementation of the development strategy of IF PAN made it possible to obtain an entry on the Polish Research Infrastructure Map in 2018, and in the years 2021-2023 to realise an ambitious investment project, subsidised in the amount of more than PLN 75 million from the funds of the Operational Programme Innovative Development. As part of this undertaking, the CEPHARES Centre for the Development of New Pharmacotherapies for Disorders of the Central Nervous System was established and opened at the Jerzy Maj Institute of Pharmacology, responding to the research challenges of contemporary neuropsychopharmacology and unmet therapeutic needs in the area of diseases of the Central Nervous System (CNS). The Centre’s activities, serving as a Core Facility for the Institute, but also enabling the implementation of its own research projects based on purchased infrastructure, focus on work aimed at elucidating the mechanisms of CNS diseases, which are a major challenge among highly developed societies (e.g. depression, schizophrenia, neurodegenerative diseases such as Parkinson’s disease, Alzheimer’s disease, anxiety disorders, drug addiction). The implementation of a comprehensive programme for the development of a new CNS drug candidate involves the use of state-of-the-art methods: chemo- and bioinformatics, medicinal chemistry, organic synthesis, analytics, biochemistry, molecular biology, electrophysiology, transgenics and a broad spectrum of purely pharmacological methods involving animal models of CNS diseases.
Organisationally, the CEPHARES Centre has been divided into 5 Research Modules, grouping the stations equipped with the project’s funds, previously included in the Polish Research Infrastructure Map. Designed and equipped with unique apparatus, the research stations enable a full pathway for the development of new drug candidates in a strategy implemented from the idea (in silico research), through compound synthesis in chemical laboratories, followed by high-throughput in vitro screening, up to the final safety studies of the drug candidate and the so-called ‘proof-of-concept’ studies on animal models, both pharmacological and transgenic, including our own, generated based on the CRISPR/Cas9 gene editing system. The state-of-the-art research infrastructure has also been designed to accommodate commercial R&D projects and the requirements for partner centres for the pharmaceutical industry. Conducting research in the CNS area, based on the infrastructural resources of CEPHARES, increases the chance of the results being used by the pharmaceutical industry in the development of new therapies for mental disorders.