Palau actively participates in the CENIT Program, an initiative of the Spanish Government to promote public and private cooperation in R&D.

The Genius Pharma program was born as the result of a partnership agreement between three established pharmaceutical companies: Almirall, Esteve and Palau, and three smaller technological companies: Crystax, Enantia and Galchimia.

The mission of the Genius Pharma project is to develop and consolidate several technological platforms that will improve the drug discovery process, from the synthesis of chemical libraries to the development of new in vivo and in vitro screening assays.

The project also promotes the collaboration of pharmaceutical companies with Universities and Public Centers with the goal of improving R&D processes within the pharmaceutical industry. Of particular interest are major therapeutic areas such as inflammation, metabolic syndrome, analgesia, and transplant rejection.

The project has a variety of additional objectives.

In terms of Medicinal Chemistry, the primary goal is to increase Palau's compound library. With regard to Discovery Biology, one of the main objectives is to improve the knowledge base for in vivo pharmacology, so that better and more predictive animal models can be created.

Through our involvement with the consortium, Palau will have access to additional data. This data will help us identify hazards and predict toxicological risks in early phases of discovery, and also enable us to discover new efficacy biomarkers.

Genius Pharma is a four year project (begun in 2006) with a budget of €40 million.