Drug giants team up for Alzheimer’s
pharmafile | February 5, 2014 | News story | Research and Development, Sales and Marketing | Accelerating Medicines Partnership, Alzheimer's, Alzheimer’s, GSK, Merck, National Institutes of Health, Pfizer
The top US medical research agency has brought together a ‘dream team’ of big pharma partners to help battle against a host of conditions, with the burden of Alzheimer’s disease chief among them.
Under a five-year collaboration co-ordinated by the US government’s National Institutes of Health, pharma companies including GlaxoSmithKline, Merck and Pfizer have agreed to invest $230 million to help identify new biological targets of the disease.
It is hoped that these targets will eventually lead to new treatments and a better understanding of the condition which affects around five million people in the US.
In what is being touted as a first for the industry, the data and analyses generated from the joint work of the new ‘Accelerating Medicines Partnership’ (AMP) will be also made available to the broader biomedical community.
In addition to Alzheimer’s, the diseases targeted will be type-2 diabetes, rheumatoid arthritis and lupus.
There are currently many treatments for diabetes and arthritis (although the burden of these diseases is increasing every year), but very few effective drugs for Alzheimer’s and lupus.
The NIH said it had picked these diseases as they are “among the biggest public health challenges facing developed nations”.
Francis Collins, director of the NIH, said that recent advances in basic research were opening opportunities for new treatments, but there was often a high rate of failure. By pooling the resources and brightest minds of the biggest companies, the AMP said it hopes to create a research ‘dream team’.
These setbacks have included the failure of two major drugs from Lilly and Pfizer last year – solanezumab and bapi respectively – which failed to help patients in two separate Phase III studies.
These were just the latest in a slew of late-stage failures for a number of big pharma firms, many of which are becoming wary of investing so heavily in an area with such a small chance of success.
By spreading the risk around this will reduce the gamble to individual firms, and keep research in the area alive – an important element for patients as Alzheimer’s research is in danger of losing its innovative edge.
Collins added: “The challenge is beyond the scope of any one of us and it’s time to work together in new ways to increase our collective odds of success.”
The AMP will set targets for each of the diseases being studied to gauge progress. Once any discoveries have been made public, the companies may compete using the findings.
Arthritis collaboration
In a separate partnership deal, the Arthritis Research UK charity has also launched a competitive call for industry and academia to develop collaborative first-in-disease clinical trials of investigational drugs for arthritis and other rheumatic diseases.
Eligible studies are expected to take advantage of the UK’s outstanding arthritis research infrastructure provided by Arthritis Research UK, and the National Institute for Health Research.
The call aims to advance the understanding of arthritis and identify experimental drugs that may be developed into new treatments for patients in the future.
The charity says in a statement: “[This] is an opportunity for leading life sciences researchers and academics to work together in world-class facilities, using state-of-the-art technologies.
“Funded by Arthritis Research UK, successful trials will be based within the network of Arthritis Research UK’s Experimental Arthritis Treatment Centres and the NIHR Translational Research Partnership in Joint and Related Inflammatory Diseases.”
The group added that setting up the industry-academia partnerships and will be supported by the NIHR Office for Clinical Research Infrastructure (NOCRI).
Professor Alan Silman, medical director at Arthritis Research UK, said: “The pharmaceutical industry, particularly in North America, is the major source of innovative novel therapies for arthritis and rheumatic diseases.
“This new partnership will ensure that these first-in-man drugs for arthritis are thoroughly investigated for effectiveness by the leading academic clinical groups in UK universities. It could result in some truly exciting new breakthroughs in the treatment of many different types of arthritis.”
Ben Adams
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