A recent article in the British Magazine titled “Drug Discovery Today,” calls for “the development of efficient models for academic–industry partnerships in drug discovery,” to address the considerable challenges the drug industry is facing.
The article, titled Drug Discovery: New Models for Industry–Academic Partnerships, asserts that the drug industry is experiencing problems with funding new drugs “due to increasing costs, decreasing productivity and attrition of projects as they progress through the development process.” As a result of these issues, “companies are responding with extensive re-organization, restructuring and re-focusing in order to address the research and development (R&D) productivity, process inefficiency, project attrition and the increasing costs of taking a potential new drug to the market and to secure profits when providing for smaller patient populations.”
In order to refocus, the authors call for academia and industry to work together for the “potential of both sectors to benefit all.” If these problems are not addressed, the productivity needed “to sustain the pharmaceutical industry as it is currently constituted” will be half than what is needed according to George Brewer’s 2006 review.
Part of the problem the article notes, is a variety of factors that have made the healthcare market increasingly complex, such as “government and commercial players driving a global trend towards cost containment.” Other factors include pressure from “pricing and reimbursement practices, mandation of generics and legislation to encourage parallel importation.”
In addition to these obstacles, “pharmaceutical companies have had to cope with a slow and inefficient regulatory process,” which has led to problematic investor and shareholder expectations. There is also the issue that while “R&D organizations have had to cope with an explosion of scientific knowledge and technologies,” they have been limited in maximizing such explosions because of “need to reduce financial risk and enhance return.” The result is organizations that divide “between ‘research’ and ‘development,’ which leads to poor management of resources. As the article notes, this divide has lead “to a decline in company’s abilities to innovate in discovery activities.”
Drug Industry
Since “the pharmaceutical industry is constantly driven by the need to maintain and increase successful product development levels and shareholder value,” companies strive for further growth to maintain the promised returns to their shareholders. Companies such as GlaxoSmithKline, AstraZeneca, Pfizer and Sanofi Aventis, are now trying “to boost the number of new therapeutic entities discovered, developed, registered and marketed and thereby to maintain the profits of the past and tackle the challenges of tomorrow.”
While it is important that these companies continue to fund new medicine, their decreasing focus on early stages of “target discovery and validation and re-focusing on later-stage development,” must be addressed. As the authors specifically note, one way to resolve this investment are “new models of interaction with research institutes and universities that are emerging to help fill the gap in pharma pipelines and complement other activities to address major new areas of research with the potential for major new product lines.”
The authors acknowledge that the use of academic-industry collaboration for drug discovery “is attractive because risks can be mitigated by sharing resources with partners.” While academic research funded by grants has resulted with important breakthroughs, universities have not been major players in pharmaceutical collaborations. Instead, “companies have defined and financed research projects using university staff and resources and appropriated value from these projects by taking ownership of the arising intellectual property, and paying royalties on sales if products are commercially successful.”
Consequently, these types of relationships do not provide a reliable pipeline of innovation for pharmaceutical R&D. As the authors note however, this “situation is now changing with a growing realization that one interest very much at the heart of both academic and industrial scientists is the desire to provide better treatment and care to patients in the clinic and the surgery.”
With this in mind, industry and academia are now working together to develop new partnerships to bridge the translational gap and form a new ‘front end’ to the early discovery phase of drug development. Universities are showing themselves to be capable of delivering new therapeutic entities to focused and efficient companies that can take these through pre-clinical and clinical development. Examples of this success include breakthroughs in rheumatoid arthritis and psoriasis, and academic–industry partnerships that delivered over 100 novel agents into clinical evaluation for cancer.
To keep this partnership successful, government funding bodies, charities, and drug companies have recently begun to help such research, since funding from pharmaceutical companies is risky and sometimes long-term.
Conclusion
The article concludes that “pharma and academia need each other to bridge the translational gap” in order to continue making new drugs and therapies. This partnership will assist with “early discovery phase of drug development, delivering new therapeutic entities to focused and efficient companies that can take these through pre-clinical and clinical development to the market.”
Accordingly, this partnership is also crucial because it will allow industry to fund and manage the expensive clinical phases, while academia can encourage innovative research and the development of ‘disruptive technologies’ that will change the face of drug discovery. Since drug discovery is so difficult, long and expensive, this partnership is crucial to help fix “industry’s declining productivity and increased costs.”
The article recommends that academia and biotech collaboration at the front end of drug discovery will allow pharma to become an “efficient development machine.” This is crucial because as the authors note: “Academia needs industry… and Industry needs academia.” Ultimately, that is why the authors assert that “industry, government and research charities need to consider effective strategies to fund and sustain the development of our academic drug discovery capabilities.”