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Health August 2013

Aid for Age

Drug Company Collaboration Rather Than Competition a Boon to Consumers

By Tait Trussell

Oxford Professor Chas Bountra has proposed such a world – where drug companies work together, sharing information instead of working separately and in secret. This vision of an eminent Oxford academic could help solve the crisis in developing treatments for age-related diseases such as dementia and cancer.

Instead of keeping ground-breaking information on disease cures dark secrets so drug companies could make billions on their discovery, what about sharing the secrets with other pharmaceutical companies?

An economically foolish idea? Or a way not only to spread risk but also maybe find cures for dread diseases and save lives?

Oxford Professor Chas Bountra has proposed such a world – where drug companies work together, sharing information instead of working separately and in secret. This vision of an eminent Oxford academic could help solve the crisis in developing treatments for age-related diseases such as dementia and cancer.

Professor Bountra, leads the Structural Genomics Consortium at Oxford University. He believes his model could also help solve the problem of a lack of new antibiotics, highlighted recently when the Government’s Chief Medical Officer, Dame Sally Davies, warned that if antibiotic resistance isn’t tackled, patients undergoing routine surgery would be dying from untreatable infections within 20 years.

Professor Bountra contends that the industry often fails to develop desperately needed new drugs because research is so expensive and failures are so frequent. The pharmaceutical industry used to be a more profitable industry. Pharma stocks were long considered as conservative investments with steady growth and attractive yields. That has changed in the past couple of decades. Profit margins for blockbuster drugs are still high, but drug companies’ earnings are under enormous pressure because of factors such as regulatory issues, high R&D expenses, length of time for FDA approvals, and legal costs. Despite this, drug companies in 2011 pulled in $600 billion in sales.

Many companies conduct similar research alone and in secret. They usually don’t share their failures. “If they did,” Bountra was quoted by the Telegraph newspaper, “they would prevent each other from going down blind alleys, and patients wouldn’t be used as guinea pigs for drugs that another company already knows won’t work.”

Forbes Magazine last year reported, “The cost of developing new drugs is spiraling. It said that it cost as much as $12 billion to produce one new successful drug. Most of the cost pays for failed projects that never see the light of day.” From 1996 to 2009, research costs have almost tripled, while fewer than half as many new drugs were approved.

A network of research-oriented academic institutions, including Harvard Medical School along with Bountra and colleagues at Oxford, are conducting the early stages of research to spot promising compounds including rare forms of cancer, dementia, common infections and schizophrenia. The effort is funded by eight drug makers.

At this stage no intellectual property rights exist. But once a new molecular entity emerges, the results are shared among all the eight investing companies. They then can use it as a starting point for drug development. It is at this point that patent law can be applied.

“Since all data is freely shared, any company is free to exploit it, which is when competition kicks in. This is the only way to reduce the current duplication, waste and needless exposure of patients to molecules destined for failure,” said Prof. Bountra.

“Currently, drug companies have to apply for a patent as soon as they develop a new molecule – years before it can be tested and developed. The patent can be close to running out by the time the finished drug gets to market – which opens them up to generic competition and reduces their returns.

“Under this new model we do the research together by pooling our expertise, often much more cheaply than any one company can do it, and then the drug companies take it on, create a proprietary molecule that they advance quickly through clinical trials – patients benefit and the company benefits.” He expects the first therapies to be available by 2020.

Professor Andy Hall, director of the Northern Institute of Cancer Research and chairman of the scientific panel of the Bone Cancer Research Trust, agrees that there are too few new drugs coming through. “We need a better model to fund and transfer the vital work undertaken in university research labs to pharmaceutical companies and what Professor Bountra’s team is offering deserves praise.”

In a somewhat related collaborative development in 2008, three of the world’s biggest drug maker agreed that the research and development model for creating new drugs needed a serious kick-start. Pfizer, Merck, and Eli Lilly, through a collaboration hatched by Boston-based PureTech Ventures, agreed to put $39 million into a new company. It is called Enlight Biosciences. Its job was to create technologies that can enable researchers to make breakthrough drugs.

Last year, 10 big drug companies formed a consortium to develop a way to make clinical trials more efficient. So cooperation continues — to the benefit of the consumer.

 

Tait Trussell is an old guy and fourth-generation professional journalist who writes extensively about aging issues among a myriad of diverse topics.

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