Industry-academic partnerships could help propel metabolic disease research

In the wake of R&D cutbacks in biopharma in the past few years, companies have been turning to academic partnerships to fill the holes left behind. And as many top-selling medicines face patent expiration and companies contend with mounting demand from investors to speed development of new drugs, research collaborations are becoming a more familiar sight in the drug industry.

These alliances benefit not only pharma companies, which gain access to world-class scientists and robust drug discovery programs, but also academic institutions, which increasingly are realizing that relationships with Big Pharma are more and more vital.

In the latest of these partnerships, Pfizer ($PFE) has teamed up with Sanford-Burnham Medical Research Institute in Orlando, FL, to identify new therapeutic targets for preventing and treating complications of obesity and diabetes.

"As pharma is facing some pressure, funding is becoming more difficult and scarce for academics," said Rick Vega, research assistant professor at Sanford-Burnham, in an interview with FierceBiotechResearch. "It's very important for academic institutions like ours to diversify funding sources. I think we're likely to see more of these types of interactions with the pharmaceutical industry."

At a recent roundtable discussion in Boston, R&D leaders convened by the Tufts Center for the Study of Drug Development (CSDD) echoed this sentiment.

"The skills and logistical coordination needed to drive today's drug development programs are often too complex for individual research organizations to tackle in isolation," Tufts CSDD Director Kenneth Kaitin said in a statement. "While best practices are still evolving, the encouraging news is that new, collaborative approaches to drug development will likely lead to innovative new medicines reaching the market faster and in greater numbers than we've seen in the past."

Vega said the new Pfizer partnership will enable Sanford-Burnham to translate more of the organization's discoveries into potential therapies. He explained that researchers will use Sanford-Burnham's Conrad Prebys Center for Chemical Genomics to screen for new relevant targets using both investigational compounds from Pfizer's arsenal and previously identified compounds from the NIH chemical library.

Leslie Molony, senior director of business development at Sanford-Burnham, told FierceBiotech Research that the institution has a translational medicine approach to developing personalized obesity therapies. Sanford-Burnham also has an existing partnership with Florida Hospital's Translational Research Institute for Metabolism and Diabetes.

"Our funding streams have been shifting over the past few years because of the number of NIH grants available," Molony said. "We have more collaborations with pharma than in the past. Some of it has been on purpose and some of it has them coming to us."

As diabetes rates in the U.S. continue to rise, now is the prime time to find new therapies for the disease, which carries with it a multitude of other health risks and complications. And industry-academic partnerships may be the best fight against the growing epidemic.

"The new frontier of diabetic therapeutics really has to go beyond [current therapies] and address the myriad of damage that goes along with diabetes," Vega said. -- Emily Mullin (email | Twitter)