AstraZeneca opens up research
pharmafile | March 28, 2014 | News story | Medical Communications, Sales and Marketing | AstraZeneca, data, research, transparency, website
AstraZeneca has created a new means of sharing some of its data with scientists, such as its bank of live and discontinued small molecules.
The Open Innovation platform is a dedicated, web-based offering which the company hopes will better facilitate research partnerships with pharma, academics, government and NGOs.
“To push the boundaries of science and deliver new medicines to patients, we need to create a more permeable research environment,” explains Mene Pangalos, executive vice president, innovative medicines and early development at AstraZeneca.
“Discovery of good science requires us all to work in more open and creative ways – an essential part of that is making our knowledge and compounds more accessible,” he adds.
Users of the newly-created platform will be able to access AstraZeneca’s clinical compound bank for new clinical and translational research.
In a blog on its website, the company provided further insight into its thinking: “Drug discovery and development is difficult, and can benefit from the contributions of many, both inside and outside a company,” it says. “At AstraZeneca, we are collaborating with external scientists more than ever before.”
It called the site “an exciting initiative to engage the external science community even more broadly”.
Don Frail, AstraZeneca’s vice president, emerging innovations, scientific partnering and alliances, says: “Through this new site, scientists around the world can submit proposals, ranging from early idea evaluation through to clinical validation studies in what we believe is one of the broadest open innovation platforms in the industry.”
Other resources include a pharmacology toolbox comprising compounds which are available for pre-clinical research to explore novel disease biology, an R&D challenge programme giving people the chance to suggest solutions to AstraZeneca’s ongoing projects, and a suggestion box through which researchers can be rewarded for coming up with ideas.
A module called Target Innovation will help investigators validate a potential new drug target they are researching, while the New Molecule Profiling module offers new information about a new compound that researchers have synthesized.
Openness has been a continuing theme in pharma for several years, and this week GlaxoSmithKline, the European Bioinformatics Institute and the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute launched their own open access research project, the Centre for Therapeutic Target Validation.
It aims to address a number of diseases, is supported by up to 50 researchers from the three founding organisations, and will be based on the Wellcome Trust Genome Campus in Hinxton, Essex.
Adam Hill
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