The key is bringing together the skill sets, philosophies and expertise of those who discover with those who know what to do with that discovery.
- Ian Tomlinson, Apollo Therapeutics
Over the past year, a four-strong team has had over a hundred meetings with scientists at three UK universities. By the end of this year, they will probably have had another hundred.
The team is garnering the most comprehensive sense of what’s happening at the bench across three UK universities – Cambridge, Imperial College London and University College London (UCL) – that anyone has ever amassed. Their job is to identify research that has the greatest potential of making it all the way through to becoming a new medicine, and then to help this happen. This is Apollo Therapeutics.
Dr Richard Butt, who heads up the team, explains the drive behind their meetings: “We live in an age of rapidly escalating biomedical innovation – an age where the development of new medicines should be at an all-time high. But the number of new drugs being developed is largely static.”
In drug discovery, the period between getting promising results in an academic lab and receiving real interest from an investor or pharmaceutical company has been called the ‘Valley of Death’ – and not without good reason. Discovering and developing potential new medicines requires not just money but also expertise and the rapid delivery of industrial-type science. Most drug candidates succumb along the way, long before it’s possible to know whether they might have fulfilled an unmet medical need.
In January 2016, the tech transfer offices (TTOs) of Cambridge, Imperial College and UCL joined forces with three global pharmaceutical companies – AstraZeneca (AZ), GSK and Johnson & Johnson – to create a £40m collaboration called Apollo Therapeutics. Their aim is to streamline the academia-to-industry pipeline by “finding the best translatable science, funding it fast and running the right development programme to make it attractive to industry,” says Butt.
In effect, Apollo aims to maximise the chance that a potential drug will be developed from emerging basic science by investing in a state-of-the-art drug discovery programme that a pharma company will find attractive to license.
“The Apollo approach is wholly new and revolutionary,” says Dr Iain Thomas, Head of Life Sciences of Cambridge Enterprise (Cambridge’s TTO). “You could say that Apollo is building reassurance. The hardest part of our job at Cambridge Enterprise is selling really good technology to pharma. It relates to the psychology of buying – people don’t buy complicated stuff with lots of risk without a lot of analysis. Reassurance comes from being engaged with an opportunity for a long time.”
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Image credit: Taema
Reproduced courtesy of the University of Cambridge
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