Academic alliances to speed Lilly’s R&D
pharmafile | March 1, 2012 | News story | Research and Development, Sales and Marketing | R&D, academia, break through drugs, collaboration, lilly
Lilly has unveiled a range of collaborations with academic researchers which it says will help it discover and develop more break through drugs.
The last few years have seen all major pharma companies place greater importance on tie-ups with academic researchers. The industry hopes that new approaches to collaboration will help harness the expertise of academia, and help translate more good pre-clinical ideas into medicines for patients.
One of the main vehicles for this will be Lilly’s ‘Innovation Starts Here’ initiative, which will include the Lilly Research Awards Programme and the Lilly Innovation Fellowship Awards.
These will allow Lilly scientists to collaborate with academic researchers on projects that will help advance Lilly’s pipeline for the future. These important programmes will also further Lilly’s investment in research and development (R&D) in Europe and the US.
“Through Innovation Starts Here, Lilly is contributing to a global collaborative culture for idea generation and innovation, helping to build the Lilly pipeline for the future while also providing resources to advance important research and development programmes in Europe,” said Jan Lundberg, executive vice president, science and technology, and president, Lilly Research Laboratories.
“Collaboration is a key component to discovering innovative medicines and improving outcomes for patients. Finding innovative medicines that have clear, demonstrable value for those diseases where the unmet need is great – like diabetes and Alzheimer’s disease – is not only a scientific imperative, it’s an economic one as well.”
Dr. Lundberg made these comments while in Brussels visiting Máire Geoghegan-Quinn, the European Commissioner for Research, Innovation and Science.
Lilly is facing patent expiry of many of its leading drugs, and is choosing to invest an above average amount of its sales back into R&D. Its 2011 global investment in R&D was approximately $5.02 billion, and the company says it has also doubled R&D investments in Europe over the past 10 years.
Examples of some of Lilly’s R&D initiatives in Europe
The company has established the Centre for Cognitive Neuroscience, an industry-academic consortium and post-doctoral fellowship programme focused on increasing the probability of clinical success for potential medicines to treat conditions involving cognitive impairment, such as sleep disorders, Alzheimer’s disease and Parkinson’s disease.
Later this spring, Lilly plans to open a new building at its Erl Wood Research Centre in the UK. Opened in 1967, Erl Wood was the company’s first R&D site outside the US.
Innovation Fellowship Awards
Lilly’s new Innovation Fellowship Awards Program will foster post-doctoral career development through the selection of highly innovative research proposals. It has created this program to broaden post-doctoral scientists’ training experiences and better prepare them for a broad range of careers, including in the pharmaceutical industry.
The awards establish a pre-competitive academic-industry training partnership where a post-doctoral fellow and academic mentor are paired with a Lilly scientist to provide the industry resources that can enable the advancement of the post-doctoral scientists’ research proposal. In 2012, the Lilly Fellowship Award Program will be by invitation only to applicants at academic research centres in the US and UK.
Research Awards Programme
The Lilly Research Awards Programme brings together a diverse group of scientists worldwide in an effort to further the advancement of research in important therapeutic areas where Lilly has expertise, including neuroscience, cancer, diabetes, immune system disorders and others.
The Lilly Research Awards Programme was established in late 2011 to identify and support research and technology collaborations between Lilly scientists and external academic experts worldwide.
The collaborations established under the Lilly Research Awards Programme provide a pre-competitive environment in which scientists in academia gain invaluable access to tools to conduct basic research, and in turn, Lilly scientists receive critical information to help inform the future of drug discovery and development.
By 2014, Lilly expects to support approximately 30 active projects a year. Examples of projects include development of new assays, validation of disease targets or biomarkers and improvement of pre-clinical models.
Three of the collaborative research projects selected for funding in 2011 under the Lilly Research Awards Programme are:
- Department of Neurobiology, University Hospital Copenhagen, Denmark: two-year programme that will explore the potential expression and function of novelreceptor variants in the brain to generate more robust findings regarding their roles in cognition, particularly as they relate to schizophrenia and Alzheimer’s disease, which could lead to the advancement of new molecules into clinical development.
- Institute of Neuroscience, Alicante, Spain: two-year programme that will advance the understanding of the neurobiology of schizophrenia in order to help manage cognitive impairment and treat negative symptoms of the disease.
- Indiana University School of Medicine, Indianapolis: two-year programme to study the roles played by distinct types of signals associated with chronic pain disorders with the long-term goal of discovering new treatments for neurological disorders and pain that deliver better patient outcomes. Indianapolis is the site of Lilly’s global corporate and R&D headquarters.
“This collaboration with Lilly allows us to take our research in this important area of cognition one step further in an effort to generate data that could help inform future clinical studies in schizophrenia and Alzheimer’s disease,” said Jens Mikkelsen, senior scientist at the Neurobiology Research Unit, Copenhagen University Hospital.
“We are excited this project was accepted and are eager to begin this important work that we believe has the potential to inform how we develop better medicines for treating neurological disorders and pain,” said Theodore Cummins, associate professor of pharmacology and toxicology, Indiana University School of Medicine.
“Collaborations between industry and academia are critical in establishing new ways of conducting basic research, and we are very pleased to work with Lilly on this project.”
Currently, Lilly is visiting academic institutions worldwide to invite them to participate in the Lilly Research Awards Programme.
Andrew McConaghie
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