The Big Red Biotech Blog

New Global Academic Alliance To Speed Drug Discovery

Six leading institutions have formed an alliance designed to accelerate the translation of academic research into usable medicines and therapies.  The six include:

• The Centre for Drug Research and Development (CDRD), Canada
• Lead Discovery Centre (LDC), Germany
• The Scripps Research Institute, Scripps Florida, United States
• The Centre for Drug Design and Discovery (CD3), KU Leuven R&D, Belgium
• Medical Research Council (MRC) Technology, United Kingdom
• Cancer Research Technology (CRT), United Kingdom

PharmTech Talk » New Global Alliance Aims To Speed Up Academic Drug Discovery.

The six organizations plan to facilitate international cooperation, develop standards and performance measurements, share best practices, expertise and resources, and collaborate on drug development projects.  Ultimately , they will work together to improve the conversion of global early-stage research into much-needed new therapies. Currently, they have a portfolio of more than 165 innovative therapeutic projects targeting significant unmet medical needs. 

This is yet another shot at improving translational activities.  Lack of good translation seems to be a popular whipping boy as to one major element that plaques the current pharma model. We'll have to see if efforts by this group or others like NIH really have a winning effect. 

Open those Drug Freezers!

Francis Collins continued to promote his concepts around translational medicine in comments posted in the WSJ Health blog this week.  He compared the need to connect basic science knowledge with practical  applications useful to treating disease as "less like buiding the Golden Gate bridge across a body of water to more like the obstacles a swimmer, sail boat or tug might face attempting cross that expanse and its hazards (e.g. sharks, reefs, storms, etc) ".

He opined that translational efforts could be speeded by encouraging all drug comanies to "open their drug freezers".  That would allow the world to test all compounds that have already been found to be safe and active against other targets (since they failed against their original targets) in an attempt to repurpose these drugs.  Having passed the safety hurdle, the drugs could then slot into phase II trials for the new indications.

Nice idea were it that simple.  It would be an interesting experiment to see if it actually did result in new therapeutic options.  Alas, the IP questions that abound from the major pharma companies keeps this experiment on the drawing board for the moment.

The NIH has a drafted a model agreement and they’re working to get drug companies to sign on, he said.  I, for one, would like to see this idea tried if for no other reason than to satisfy my curiosity as to whether it could work. It sounds almost too good to be true -- that we could actually benefit from a lot of science that has already been completed and paid for....

Mr Big Pharma, Let Those Drugs Go. Tear Down that Wall.

Posted by Bruce Lehr Apr 12th 2012.

GSK Jumps on Translational Research Bandwagon

Translational research is a hot topic.  Earlier this year, Francis Collins announced the NIH would be setting up its own Translational Research center.  Last week, Sanofi's Elias Zerhouni acknowledged translational research was a lot harder than it looked and that Sanofi would be opening things up to collaborate more in external sectors - particularly with academia and hospitals.

Today, GSK announced a funding deal with Ontario's MaRS Innovation group to accelerate translational research in the province and help close Canada's "innovation gap".  The deal is meant to provide cash and collaborators to researchers working on projects with a lot of in-licensing potential or that could serve as the basis of a biotech start-up.

"Collaborations such as these -- where we share knowledge, expertise and resources -- provide a highly effective way of progressing and commercializing cutting edge research," said Paul Lucas, CEO of GSK of Canada.

As noted by Fierce Biotech, GSK is just the latest Big Pharma company -- including others like Pfizer and Sanofi -- embrace external collaborations to boost R&D productivity and output as they've been disatisfied with the recent (last 10 yrs) returns on internal programs.

 

 

 

 

Posted by Bruce Lehr May 31st 2011.  

Derek Notes Zerhouni "Gets Lost in the Translation"

I knew when I read the WSJ report yesterday covering Sanofi's Elias Zerhouni's remarks on the translation process from "bench to bedside" being "more difficult" then he thought that Derek Lowe would notice.  His post this morning in the In the Pipeline blog therefore didn't disappoint me.

Predictably we can conclude that it IS a lot harder than it looks.  What's more? it isn't going to be easy to fix, and coming up with a new model isn't too simple either.  Undoubtedly casting a wider net beyond the walls of Sanofi's own R&D group (so-called "open innovation") will help, but by how much? We'll see -- and as noted yesterday -- it will be interesting to note if "outside collaboration" will include working with NIH's new translational medicine group or not.

 

Posted by Bruce Lehr May 24th 2011.

 

Sanofi's Zerhouni "Backs Off" Easy Translational Solution

As reported in Fierce Biotech and the WSJ today, former NIH Head and current Sanofi head of R&D Elias Zerhouni admits that fixing problems with translatinal research in Big pharma is "more difficult than I thought".

In fact, with about 2+ years on the job, he has decided that adopting a "biotech-like" approach by itself will not work.  He says there must be a complete R&D "re-do" on development. The re-do in his terms calls for more open innovation models whereby Sanofi collaborates much more with external groups in universites and hospitals among others.

He says Sanofi will now first focus understanding a disease and then will figure out what tools might be needed to treat the disease - a reversal of the former practice of finding a tool and then trying to figure out to what disease it might be applied.  To further help, Sanofi cut its number of programs in half, down to 60, to provide more focus and understanding in that more limited population. It's now striving to get more real-world exposure to treating patients with these diseases with its network of outside collaborators.

I think it will be interesting to see how Sanofi might interact with the NIH now that the latter has announced plans for a Translational Medicine Center and Zerhouni's past ties to the institution. No doubt -- given his past passion for translational medicine -- it's no coincidence that the NIH adopted an initiative in this area.

 

 

Posted by Bruce Lehr May 23rd 2011.

New Cures! Faster! Faster!

Here's one from the In the Pipeline blog, recounting the uproar in the academic research community over the NIH's plan to open a Translational Medicine center to help move discoveries quicker toward commercialization - based on the debatable assumption that Big Pharma is not acting on all the leads that are available to it in a timely manner.

On the pro side, the NIH program will be successful in helping to move more drugs to market. In fact, there was a recent study published in NEJM that supports the notion that academic centers have been very instrumental in helping to deliver about 20% of newly licensed drugs since the 1970's.  So maybe Francis Collins is right and a new translational medicine effort by NIH will bolster even these figures substantially.

On the con side, naysayers lament that medical research can't really be run according to a business timeline and that any effort to do so will result in wasted dollars/efforts that will seriously deplete the NIH coffers for years to come - and effectively produce a demonstrably negative impact on the science in the future.

In the Pipeline cites a Biocentury article that concludes that there is too much tendency among basic scientists to "sell their work" - which simplifies the process from basic discovery to practical cure. 

"There is a real danger of over-promising," states Keith Yamamoto, executive vice dean of the University of California San Francisco School of Medicine, "Scientists too often take an intellectual short cut.......they just say if you give me money we are about to cure the disease."

Well, let's hope that if the NIH does get the money for the translational medicine center that it will help promote some cures and bring some new therapies to market -- and that this will substantively augment the current Big Pharma R&D model.

But, I'm always reminded by my boss that "hope is not a strategy."

Posted by Bruce Lehr Feb 15th 2011.

Derek is Dubious of NIH Translational Med Success

The In the Pipeline blog this morning has a post entitled, "The NIH's New Drug Discovery Center: Heading into the Swamp?"  That would seem to capture his thougts well on the chances of the Center making a transformational difference in drug discovery area. I think his concluding blog post paragraph sums it up well:

...So, reluctantly, I'll make a prediction: if years of effort and billions of dollars thrown after genetic target-based drug discovery hasn't worked out, when done by people strongly motivated to make money off their work, then an NIH center focused on the same stuff will, in all likelihood, add very little more. It's not like they won't stay busy. That sort of work can soak up all the time and money that you can throw at it. And it will.

This seems to represent a majority pharma industry consensus and may also be shared by some significant percentage of the NIH as a whole.  Time will tell if Collins is visionary or father of an academic funding boondoggle.

Posted by Bruce Lehr Feb 1st 2011.

Francis Collins Moves NIH Into Drug Development

An admittedly "little frustrated" Francis Collins says that he plans to fund the new NIH center for translational medicine with $1 B to help kick start translation of "scientific breakthroughs" into marketed therapeutics.

What Innovation? NIH Moves Into Drug Development // Pharmalot.

Collins plan is for scientists in the new center to get enough proof-of-concept data together to spur pharma industry investment and bringing the products to market, i.e. gain regulatory approval. Many commentators question the skills/experience NIH has for this type of product development -- as generally speaking academic scientists receive little if any training from this perspective. 

Questions Dr. Thomas Inset, director of National Institute for Mental Health (how appropriate), "Would we be foolish -- we being an agency that has never developed drugs and actually doesn't know how to do therapeutics that well -- to get into this space?" 

In a word, LIKELY.  This will either be beginning of a new paradigm of academic and industry collaboration or a tremendous waste of funding that could have gone to more basic research questions that NIH staff are skilled at delineating and answering.

PhRMA responded with a carefully worded statement.  The statement encourages the NIH "in the hope of improving the ultimate success rates in drug development."  But it also finishes with the following,

"The fact remains that biopharmaceutical research companies today and in the future will play a pivotal role: Our companies create the vast majority of new medicines from start to finish [emphasis added] and, for the remainder, in close collaboration with academia and NIH, fulfill the critical final phase that transforms promising molecules into actual medicines for patients."

Maybe we need to spend the extra $1 B on more small biotech tax credits and grants aimed at translational studies?

 

 

Posted by Bruce Lehr Jan 24th 2011.