AstraZeneca to freely share drug compounds with UK groups
pharmafile | December 5, 2011 | News story | Research and Development, Sales and Marketing | AstraZeneca, research
AstraZeneca will make 22 of its compounds available free of charge to UK academia next year as part of a tie-up with the Medical Research Council.
The idea is that academic researchers will compete for a share of £10 million worth of funding from the MRC to look at the compounds in new disease areas, with the goal of speeding up the delivery of medicines to patients.
MRC chief executive Sir John Savill said it “marks a new era in medical discovery, open innovation and public-private collaboration”.
Projects cannot duplicate existing studies or directly contribute to AstraZeneca development programmes.
The Anglo-Swedish firm will retain rights over the chemical composition of the compounds, but new research findings will be owned by the academic institution.
Universities and science minister David Willetts called the agreement a ‘real boost’ for British science.
“This will keep the UK at the very forefront of biomedical research and drive growth and innovation in our life sciences industry,” he added.
When it comes to intellectual property generated from use of the compounds, AstraZeneca says it will vary from project to project, but will be “equitable and similar to those currently used in academically-led research”.
The manufacturer points out the fact that its compounds “have taken millions of pounds to develop so far”, and says the new collaboration is “crucial to our ability to find solutions to society’s unmet medical needs”.
The average sector cost of bringing a new medicine to market was £630 million this year, so making compounds available to outside researchers while retaining some rights over them makes sense for AstraZeneca.
Compounds that undergo early trials are often then put on hold for a variety of reasons, and researchers will benefit from access to information and resources that they would not otherwise have.
David Brennan, AstraZeneca’s chief executive, said: “We hope that in sharing these valuable compounds with academic scientists through the MRC, new discoveries will be made by exploring additional uses of these compounds.”
Niche projects
It may also be a way for AstraZeneca to improve its own research links, as if potential projects duplicate or overlap AstraZeneca’s active development programmes, they cannot be funded by the MRC – but the company may choose to work with the researchers directly.
“In today’s resource-constrained environment, external collaborations such as these provide a means to test a compound across a range of therapeutic indications with underlying rationale,” an AstraZeneca spokesman told Pharmafocus.
“These may include niche, less-commercially attractive, but viable patient populations,” he added.
There has been a great deal of movement on public-private collaborations in health and pharma over the last couple of years.
In October 2010 the Department of Health announced more than £50 million of funding into the Stratified Medicines Innovation Platform, to help the pharma industry develop more effective drugs for smaller patient groups.
Meanwhile in August this year, the government announced that research into dementia, cancer, diabetes and heart disease would be among the activities to benefit from a new £800 million government funding package.
The translational research brings together the pharma industry, NHS, universities and charities under the auspices of the National Institute for Health Research, which oversees NHS research.
A list of the compounds can be found here.
Adam Hill
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