Pfizer launches global centres for therapeutic innovation
First centre is at the University of California in San Francisco
Pfizer is establishing the Global Centres for Therapeutic Innovation, a network of partnerships with leading academic medical centres to speed up the discovery of new drugs. The first collaboration in the network is with the University of California in San Francisco (UCSF).
UCSF revealed that the New York pharmaceutical firm will pay US$85m in research support and milestone payments over the next five years if the partnership leads to the development of significant new therapies for diseases with unmet medical need.
The collaboration is designed substantially to reduce the time required to translate promising biomedical research into new drugs and therapies – a process now estimated to take more than 15 years and US$1bn per drug.
According to UCSF, the partnership, which could advance up to 10 projects at a time, breaks from traditional public-private partnerships by creating an open network of researchers.
UCSF said the alliance would give university researchers unprecedented access to Pfizer’s r&d expertise, as well as to Pfizer scientists who can help match company resources with promising research programmes.
‘The Centres for Therapeutic Innovation represents a truly novel open innovation paradigm, combining the unique advantages of top academic research institutions with Pfizer's leading drug development capabilities and research technologies,’ said Mikael Dolsten, president of Pfizer Worldwide Research & Development.
‘This new way of engaging leading external scientists is a key component of our r&d strategy. We are excited to pioneer this approach to seek to translate science into novel proofs of mechanism in a more efficient and accelerated manner to better serve patients.’
Anthony Coyle will head Pfizer’s Global Centres for Therapeutic Innovation, headquartered in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He was previously vice president and global head of respiratory, inflammation, and autoimmune research at MedImmune Biologics, a division of AstraZeneca.
Jose-Carlos Gutierrez-Ramos, Pfizer's senior vice president of Worldwide BioTherapeutics Research and Development, said: ‘This new model complements the venture capitalist-funded biotech start-up and has the potential to catalyse the transformation of global biomedical drug discovery by advancing scientific breakthroughs in translational medicine.’
In addition to funding pre-clinical and clinical development programmes, Pfizer will offer its partners equitable intellectual property and ownership rights to support continued experimentation and exploration, as well as broad rights to publication. Milestone payments and royalties related to the advancement of sponsored programmes will also be granted. In return, Pfizer will have the opportunity potentially to broaden its pipeline with novel candidate drugs to treat diseases of medical need.
The Centres for Therapeutic Innovation will initially focus on collaborations within the US. It is expected to expand into Europe and Asia in 2012.
Each Centre will be governed by a joint steering committee comprised of Pfizer and academic medical centre representatives who will provide leadership and evaluate the success of each programme through discovery and early stage clinical development.