By Isha Antani
Yes, many of us are aware of the issues that the current pharmaceutical industry is facing. It’s a well-known fact that more money being pumped into the drug discovery process is resulting in less drug discovery. This is due to high failure rates of potential drug candidates either in Phase I (safety) or Phase 2 (efficacy) of the pipeline.
Academia, while known to have a good target discovery rate, is weak in the area of drug discovery and often has to spend a good amount of time seeking financial means to support its work. Additionally, while pharmaceuticals spend large sums on high-risk drugs with blockbuster potential, academia is more attuned to researching rare cases and is often funded by foundations set up for these specific cases. Both pharma and academia could use a bit of help from one another. And, slowly, both are.
Up until the 1980s, there was a huge barrier to get pharmaceuticals to invest in targets discovered in academic labs. Academic labs that had been funded by the government were not allowed to patent their efforts. Therefore, pharmaceuticals didn’t really have the incentive to go after a drug that any other company could also potentially develop. However, in the 1980s the Bayh-Dole act was passed which allowed patents to be placed on federally funded research projects, leading to a much better technology transfer between the two arms. However, true collaboration was still lacking.
Now, due to the current dismal state of drug pipelines, the two sectors have been coming together for various initiatives with hopes that better targets generated by academia will lead to better (and cheaper) drug development. AstraZeneca, for example, has collaborated with Columbia University to understand the area of metabolic diseases while Pfizer, a big believer in academia-industry collaboration, has multiple projects with academia. The collaboration makes sense and in a way, there are incentives for both parties involved—the academic labs, who carry the focused expertise, retain the intellectual property rights on their discovery while the pharmas, who are profit-making companies, save money in the discovery process and get the right into developing the process and marketing the discovered target in their preferred manner. It’s a win-win situation for both parties and for the greater public, who gets to see effective, cheaper drugs on the market at a faster rate.
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