Is there a role for universities in discovering drugs?
A decade ago the answer to this question would almost certainly have
been ‘no’. However, the pharmaceutical industry landscape has changed immensely
since then. This is particularly true in R&D where the global companies
(‘big pharma’) have largely struggled to successfully fill their new product
pipelines. New R&D models are being tested and companies have become much
more collaborative in nature – ‘open innovation’ is now the name of the game.
These sorts of rewards may well have stimulated other universities and
it is interesting to note that that over 80 institutions are members of
the Academic Drug Discovery Consortium (‘ADDC’). This
is largely a US-based organisation but increasingly foreign entities like Sweden’s Karolinska Institute, are now members. The
purpose of the ADDC is to facilitate the exchange of know-how and expertise
among centres as well as to provide a platform for partnering/collaborating
with service providers, biotech and big pharma companies.
Examples of recent collaborations between big pharma and academic
institutions include Merck’s $90 million funding of a partnership with academic
scientists and biotechnology entrepreneurs to create the California Institute
for Biomedical Research (Calibr) in San Diego. Here in the UK, Novo Nordisk is funding 10 researchers at the Kennedy Institute of
Rheumatology at Oxford University to develop new drug candidates for rheumatoid
arthritis and other autoimmune inflammatory diseases.
An interesting model for a drug discovery institute is the Vanderbilt
Center for Neuroscience Drug Discovery (‘VCNDD’) in Nashville. Founded in 2007,
the VCNDD is made up of 100 scientists and has resources that rival those of
many industrial neurosciences groups. Furthermore, the VCNDD has been able to
attract funding from a variety of sources including government entities (e.g. NIH),
charities (e.g. the Michael J. Fox Foundation) and big pharma (e.g.
AstraZeneca, and Bristol-Myers Squibb). With its focus in the neurosciences,
the VCNDD is operating in a research area that many big companies have exited.
Thus, they are filling a void and, if any of their programmes look promising in
early clinical studies, there is likely to be significant interest from big
pharma.
Ironically, these academic research efforts may have benefited from the
big pharma cutbacks. In the UK many of the big pharma R&D sites have been
closed or downsized (most recently AstraZeneca and Pfizer), leading to many experienced
drug discovery scientists looking for new opportunities. I’m personally
involved in a number of university-based drug discovery projects where former big
pharma researchers are playing significant roles; their previous drug discovery
experience is clearly valued in these new settings.
My colleague Bill Primrose and I wrote a chapter on open innovation in drug
discovery for a recently published book, The Innovation Handbook (publisher
Kogan Page). We cited lots of examples of collaborative projects between
academia and industry, and it is worth noting that, for once, Europe is at the
forefront of new approaches to innovation. Notable examples include the NewDrugs4BadBugs
initiative for antibiotic discovery and development (a project with a budget of
€223.7 million with participants including the Innovative Medicines Initiative
(‘IMI’), AstraZeneca and GlaxoSmithKline), and the European Lead Factory drug
discovery programme (a €196 million initiative involving IMI and 30 academic and industry partners).
Given the historical success rates in drug discovery and development,
not all of these initiatives will work but I’m encouraged by the fact that many
different approaches are being explored to fill the gap left by big pharma’s
R&D cutbacks.
Labels: drug discovery, universities