The world needs new medicines to be developed. It’s time-consuming and costly, and that’s why we need an ecosystem that will nurture and speed up the success.
- Tony Kouzarides
Professor Tony Kouzarides is the founding Director of the Milner Therapeutics Institute, which is due to open in 2018 on the Cambridge Biomedical Campus. The ecosystem he sees thriving within its walls is one in which academic researchers (“experts in the biology of diseases”) work closely with pharmaceutical companies (“who know what’s needed to get the drug to clinic”) to find new medicines. Put simply, he says, the Institute will be “a pipeline for drug discovery within an academic setting.”
While the labs are being fitted out with robotics for customised drug screening, gene-editing facilities to rewrite DNA and bioinformatics support to help scientists deal with huge datasets, the partnerships between industry and academia are already under way.
In June 2015, a research agreement was signed between the University of Cambridge, the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute and the Babraham Institute with three pharmaceutical companies – AstraZeneca (AZ), Astex and GSK. Since then, Pfizer, Shionogi and Elysium Pharmaceuticals have joined the Milner Therapeutics Consortium, the outreach programme of the Institute.
With this one agreement, doors opened. Dr Kathryn Chapman, Executive Manager of the Milner Therapeutics Institute, explains: “Forming the Consortium means there’s now a free exchange of potential drug molecules between pharma and academia. This sounds straightforward but, before the agreement, this could take a year because of confidentiality and material transfer contracts. Now it takes two to three weeks. It lowers barriers of engagement, it speeds up research and it can involve hundreds of molecules in one go.”
One consequence is drugs that have already been approved for use in certain diseases are now being tested for use in other diseases – a practice called repositioning or repurposing.
“An academic might have developed a brain disease model using an organoid – a mini organ in a Petri dish,” explains Kouzarides. “We can use this to test drugs that have been licensed for use in other diseases such as arthritis or cancer.”
It also means that novel therapeutic agents across the entire portfolio of drugs being developed by each of the companies can be screened at an early stage in biological assays, to see whether any are worth progressing along the drug development pipeline.
Reproduced courtesy of the University of Cambridge
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