Abstract

Running Academia-Industry Drug Discovery Collaborations: Herding Cats Whilst Dancing with the Devil

Tim Hammonds, Deputy Director of Drug Discovery, Cancer Research Technology

Driven by a lack of late stage success and falling investment in early research, Pharma has reached out to academia earlier in the discovery process in order to access more, hopefully better, drug discovery targets. Collaboration mechanisms are in place that allow for exchanges of knowledge and information to enable new discovery paradigms. Many models of collaboration have been built, from simple arrangements for access to high throughput screening sets to fully collaborative discovery alliances. Despite very different structures, rewards and drivers it is now possible to have fully integrated academia – industry alliances that dispel feelings of “them and us”, and a strengthening realisation that to tackle the complexity of diseases and make new drugs it is far more sensible to somehow become “us”. In order to do this, many old prejudices have had to be forgotten and rulebooks in both institutions partially rewritten. This talk focuses on the creation and running of such alliances and looks at ways to engineer win-win situations for all concerned.