Saturday
22 November 2008
22 November 2008
| Big Pharma And NIH Place Their Hopes On Cooperation |
 |
 |
| Medicine - Hormones & Meds | |||
| Written by TS-Si News Service | |||
| Saturday, 19 April 2008 17:00 | |||
St. Louis, MO, USA. The high costs of early stage drug research has stimulated significant changes to drug discovery and the pharmaceutical industry. Christopher Austin, M.D., is a top researcher at the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the director of the NIH Chemical Genomics Center (NCGC).  The NIH and Austin have helped transform the business of drug research and development. He says changes currently underway can only increase over the next five to 10 years. According to both industry and academia welcome more cooperation in drug discovery to secure more efficient results for less financial burden than if they operate independently. “The increased participation of the public sector in therapeutics development is a trend that will be good for industry, academia, scientific discovery and the public at large,” says Dr. Austin.
These collaborative efforts have been facilitated by researchers moving from industry to academia to help close the gap that exists between basic early stage research and the identification of viable drug candidates for a range of diseases. This is particularly true for those disease conditions that are less prevalent, or for which the targets are less well validated. The hope is that better drugs to treat more diseases will be developed faster and less expensively than ever before.
Dr. Austin says he wants his work to improve the lives of people affected by disease; he also is a former pharmaceutical industry researcher who previously worked at Merck & Co. for a number of years. He’s observed that industry scientists are constrained in the scope of targets and diseases they study by commercial regulatory imperatives which do not exist in the public sector.
“The work we do at the NNCGC is complementary to what industry does — we work on the 90% of new targets and diseases that industry doesn’t, and we make our data publicly available so all researchers, public and private, can use it to advance drug discovery.”
Marcie Glicksman, Ph.D., is the senior director of lead discovery, laboratory of drug discovery, at the Harvard NeuroDiscovery Center. Dr. Austin and Dr. Glicksman spoke on this topic at the 14th Annual Conference & Exhibition of the Society for Biomolecular Sciences (SBS) 6-10 April 2008 at America’s Center in St. Louis. She also came from industry. Glicksman has high hopes for the increased collaboration between “Big Pharma” and academia in drug discovery.
“At Harvard, our mission is to develop new therapeutics for diseases with no disease modifying treatments such as Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s, or orphan diseases such as Huntington’s and Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (Lou Gehrig’s),” she states. “There are smaller numbers of patients affected by orphan diseases — treatments for them are not considered billion dollar drugs, so they are much harder to develop in industry.”
Like Dr. Austin, Dr. Glicksman says it’s simply too expensive for industry to conduct this early stage research, and that is why the academic centers are so vital to the future of drug discovery for diseases that industry can’t address on its own.
 The TS-Si News Service is a collaborative effort by TS-Si.org editors, contributors, and corresponding institutions. The sources can include the cited individuals and organizations, as well as TS-Si.org staff contributions. Articles and news reports do not necessarily convey official positions of TS-Si, its partners, or affiliates. We welcome your comments. Use the form below to leave a public comment or send private correspondence via the TS-Si Contact Page. We will not divulge any personal details or place you on a mailing list without your permission.
Set as favorite
Bookmark
Email This
Comments (0)
 Write comment
|
|||
| Last Updated on Saturday, 19 April 2008 17:13 |
Subscribe to this comment's feed
Show/Hide comments
Show/Hide comment form
The TS-Si News Service is a collaboration of TS-Si staff, contributors, and corresponding institutions. Contents do not necessarily convey official positions of TS-Si, its partners, or affiliates