Partnership will invest US$230m to find new ways to target hard-to-treat diseases
Initiative aims to speed up discovery of new treatments for these illnesses
The Accelerating Medicines Partnership (AMP) has been set up by the US National Institutes of Health (NIH), ten leading pharmaceutical companies and a number of non-profit organisations, with the aim of understanding the biology of difficult-to-treat diseases and developing better medicines for their treatment.
The AMP will invest US$230m over five years to support the large-scale characterisation of the underlying pathology of Alzheimer's disease, Type 2 diabetes, rheumatoid arthritis, and lupus.
The Boston Consulting Group (BCG), a global management consulting firm, supported AMP's initial conception, organisation design and detailed research plans for each of the diseases targeted.
'Too many hoped-for drugs fail during R&D, and the reason for this is that we don't fundamentally understand the biology we're trying to modify,' said Michael Ringel, a BCG partner and co-leader of the firm's team facilitating the partnership. 'AMP is the sort of systematic effort that is needed to help us really understand these diseases, ultimately leading to better medicines.'
AMP is the sort of systematic effort that is needed to help us really understand these diseases
The AMP will design a series of large-scale human studies that will deepen understanding of how each disease unfolds and how it differs across patients. Through the partnership, each new effort will augment the data being generated by technological revolutions in fields such as genomics and proteomics.
'The exciting thing about this approach is that bringing together academic, industry, and government scientists creates a unique mixture of ideas and skills and ensures that the relay race between these sectors is as seamless as possible, so patients get new therapies faster,' said Sarah Cairns-Smith, a BCG partner and co-leader of the team facilitating the partnership.
Initial findings are expected to be available for some of these efforts within two years. By the five-year mark, the work should have produced not only a greater understanding of the diseases being studied but also insight into how the conditions differ across individuals – information that will lead to better understanding of drug targets in different patient groups.
The ten pharmaceutical companies that participated in establishing AMP are AbbVie, Biogen Idec, Bristol-Myers Squibb, GlaxoSmithKline, Johnson & Johnson, Eli Lilly, Merck & Co, Pfizer, Sanofi and Takeda.
