Wyeth to collaborate with Scottish universities on biomarkers
pharmafile | April 11, 2006 | News story | Research and Development |
Wyeth is to invest $86 million in a new collaboration with Scotland's leading medical researchers in a cutting edge area of pharmaceutical research.
The alliance is called the Translational Medicine Research Collaboration (TMRC) and will bring together Scotland's four major medical universities (Aberdeen, Dundee, Edinburgh and Glasgow), Wyeth, Scottish Enterprise and the NHS.
Translational medicine is a new field that integrates the study of diseases with the development of new therapies and diagnostics.
A major aim of the work is to identify 'biomarkers', the specific signals within patient populations that can be used to select the best therapy for an individual patient. The co-founders of the TMRC hope to produce faster, more efficient and effective clinical tests of new therapies where a candidate drug is studied in smaller, better defined patient groups.
Wyeth is developing drugs in a number of disease areas including oncology, musculoskeletal biology, metabolic diseases and Alzheimer's disease, and spent more than $2.7 billion on Research and Development in 2005. The company hopes to take a lead role in translational medicine, which could bridge the gap between basic pre-clinical drug discovery and the clinic.
The TMRC model will be based on a central core laboratory working with 'Centres of Excellence' at each of the universities. This central laboratory will be based at the University of Dundee and will interact with each of the universities medical schools, where specialised clinical research programmes will be conducted.
"This translational medicine research collaboration represents a truly novel concept in industry-academic-government partnership. Translational medicine is a key success factor to development of the next generation of innovative medicines," says Frank Walsh head of Wyeth Discovery Research.
Jack Perry, chief executive of Scottish Enterprise says: "Translational medicine provides a major opportunity to reduce the bottlenecks in the development of new drug treatments, resulting in significant benefits in economic development and health."
