University Based Drug Discovery
Should Universities engage in drug discovery, as opposed to basic research into the causes of disease? I have often heard it argued that they shouldn’t, in fact I probably said it myself in the years before I found the escape tunnel out of AstraZeneca. i think this is a common view amongst people in the industry, in fact a colleague of mine (an experienced and successful medicinal chemist working in a University) was told by an industry scientist that what he was doing was immoral.
I think there are different strands to this argument, usually made by industry insiders. One of these is the “we are the experts in this and University scientists don’t have the skills, expertise or resources to do what we do. Our activities are commercial and increasingly industrialised and Universities are naive to think they could compete. Universities should stick to feeding the industry with new clinical and biological insight that the experts can convert into products and training people that we need to run our business”.
I have some sympathy with the view that many University scientists are naive when it comes to understanding the complexity of the challenge in inventing new drugs and there is no doubt in my mind that Universities have a responsibility to be innovators and educators, but I don’t see why this precludes an active engagement in the practice of drug discovery. What better way to demonstrate innovation or to train people than the application of novel approaches and technologies to the practice of drug discovery? And drug discovery (and science generally) is undergoing a democratisation of access to the tools and data that underpin science-based invention. Looking at chemical information and systems for example and take the move to open science and open data and compare ChemSpider with CAS Online or Blue Obelisk with Accelrys. We are moving into a different environment where small teams, working together in novel ways can use the tools that the big companies have and this plays to the strengths of University based and independent scientists.
In fact, is this not what some in the industry are searching for? here is Jean-Pierre Garnier (CEO of GSK) writing in the Harvard Business Review
“The model of a company concentrating all of its resources inside its four walls is obsolete. Big Pharma players can no longer hope to generate the absolutely best science in all areas on their own.”
The new GSK organisation model also sounds familiar — smaller independent groups of around 80 scientists working independently and looking for innovators outside the company. Sounds a bit like the Pharma industry used to be in its most productive years, before the aggregation into globally managed complex organisations.
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Comments
It would be naive to think that we could develop a drug from start to finish in an academic setting. The drug companies have more resources, experience and motive in most cases for doing that.
However, especially because our motivation is different, we can offer something that they cannot: radical openness. This concept has really struck a chord at the SciFoo meeting this weekend and I think in the coming year we will see more examples of how openness can create solutions and results that conventional secrecy (academic or commercial) cannot match.
I like the thinking, but academia and industry should be very clear on the goals and responsibilities. I think the bottom-line behind the GSK statement is that not everyone can spend resources on everything ! Still, at some point the drug design process requires a lot of expertise, and this must come (in some package) from somewhere.
Interesting questions. One of the persistent challenges of academia is the shifting sands of the academic/industry interface. Once something is discovered, there is a development phase, and there is a point where further development is better carried out in an industrial environment. I’d be interested to know what the guys at the Sandler Centre have to say on this issue.
However, as JC says, there are some problems that are unsolvable by both academic and industrial approaches, because the associated risk is too great based on the metrics of those areas (citations in the former, $ in the latter). Open science would seem to be the way to go for these problems. JC is doing drug discovery in this way and I’m doing an asymmetric synthesis. Perhaps there is always going to be a dynamic contribution of all three - for example should industry consider collaborating with academia to solve some problems, and make others open?
Mat
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