Seven European drugmakers
are to pool their research efforts with academic scientists and smaller
companies in a new 196 million euros ($265 million) project designed to find
tomorrow's medicines.
The project, backed by the
European Union, is the latest example of the drugs industry exploring ways to
share early-stage research, effectively taking lessons from the kind of open
innovation that gave the world Linux software.
As part of the European
Lead Factory scheme, pharmaceutical companies will contribute at least 300,000
chemical compounds from their in-house collections and a further 200,000 will
be developed jointly by academia and small firms.
The idea is to use
crowdsourcing to generate novel ideas for tackling certain diseases, which can
then be tested by screening compounds using shared pharmaceutical industry
know-how.
"It's a big change for
companies because their compound libraries have usually been kept very
secret," said Ton Rijnders, scientific director of Dutch non-profit group
TI Pharma, who is helping to run the project.
"They are doing this
because it is cheaper than building ever larger libraries on their own - and
partnering with academics gives them access to innovative ideas."
The seven drugmakers
involved in the scheme are Bayer , AstraZeneca, Sanofi, Lundbeck , Merck KGaA, UCB and
Janssen, the European arm of Johnson & Johnson. Academic partners include
universities in Germany,
Britain, the Netherlands and Denmark.
The programme is supported
by the EU-led Innovative Medicines Initiative (IMI), which supports early-stage
collaborative research in conjunction with academia.
The IMI was set up five years
ago in a bid to re-establish Europe as the "pharmacy of the world"
and close a growing gap with United States and Asia on drug research. For academic researchers,
the scheme will offer unprecedented access to industry chemical collections.
Industry, meanwhile, should benefit from having independent scientists taking a
fresh look at their assets.
Drugmakers often have
scores of compounds sitting in warehouses or freezers with no apparent use,
following initially promising tests that led nowhere. But there are many examples
of drugs originally meant for one disease being repurposed for another. One
high-profile case is AZT, originally an unsuccessful cancer drug that became
the first effective treatment for HIV, the virus that causes AIDS.
The U.S. National
Institutes of Health last May launched a similar pilot project to test
experimental drugs provided by manufacturers and several other public-private
drug research partnerships are at various stages of development.