Precompetitive Collaboration: Emerging Realism in the Pharma World

In the world of drug discovery, pharmaceutical companies face a very sobering statistic – more than 90% of the drugs that reach clinical testing will fail. This high failure rate is not only a major financial concern for the pharma industry, but it also negatively affects the millions of patients that are sick and desperately waiting for new medicines. Reducing the clinical failure rate is a critical step in creating a more successful and sustainable pharmaceutical industry.

Researchers in pharma/biotech and academia faced a similar challenge during the late 1980s and early 1990s with AIDS/HIV. At that time, the scientific community was able to rapidly and successfully develop several anti-HIV drugs thanks, in no small part, to the use of pre-competitive research collaborations. Janet Woodcock, director of the Center for Drug Evaluation and Research (CDER) at the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), writes, “precompetitive research is a subset of translational research that focuses on improving the tools and techniques needed for successful translation, and not on development of a specific product.”

In a precompetitive collaboration, a variety of different organizations (that typically would compete with each other) work together or share information. For AIDS/HIV research, partners that worked together precompetitively included pharmaceutical and biotech companies, academic research centers and government research institutes.

Pharmaceutical companies have historically done all of their drug discovery research in house. But in the last 10 years, it has become increasingly clear that the pharmaceutical industry must change its research model if it is to remain viable. Challenges facing the industry include:

1. Increasing cost of research coupled with abysmal rates of clinical success
2. Expiration of patent protection leading to loss of exclusivity (the so-called patent cliff)
3. Competition from biosimilars and generics

To address these challenges, some pharmaceutical companies are, for the first time, engaging in precompetitive partnerships with other pharma competitors, with government organizations and with academic research centers. For example, the large pharma company GlaxoSmithKline recently formed a precompetitive collaboration with the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute and the European Bioinformatics Institute to establish the Center for Therapeutic Target Validation (CTTV). The three organizations will pool resources to discover new potential drug targets that all of the partners will be able to access.

Similarly, the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) launched a precollaborative effort called the Accelerating Medicines Partnership (AMP) to identify efficacy and safety issues for compound collections that serve as the starting points for many new drug discovery projects. By working precompetitively to identify compound liabilities early in the research process, it is hoped that everyone will benefit from reduced clinical failure rate.

Additional precompetitive partnership examples include the Innovative Medicines Initiative (IMI) in Europe, the Critical Path Institute (CPI) in the US, the Structural Genomics Consortium (SGC) and Oxford University’s Target Discovery Institute (TDI). These partnerships are specifically geared toward translational research that will lead ultimately to the commercialization of new medicines.

Pharmaceutical companies and other large research organizations are beginning to work together precompetitively in other ways as well. Pfizer, AstraZeneca, the US National Cancer Institute and a host of other biotech, pharma and academic organizations have worked together with Scientist to create preclinical research marketplaces that share precompetitive information. Each Scientist client has its own private research marketplace but the underlying supplier and service databases are shared precompetitively. In 2015, some of the pharma companies will begin sharing supplier ratings as well.

Precompetitive research partnerships can, at times, be difficult to manage owing to the size and bureaucratic nature of large research partners. At times there are also legal challenges involving intellectual property rights that are often difficult to overcome. Nevertheless, the pooling of resources early in the drug discovery process, before a drug candidate has been selected for the clinic, should have an outsized effect on pharma productivity, leading to both increased innovation and reduced costs.

That said, it is important to understand that the time to act and establish precompetitive collaboration is now; as Janet Woodcock says in her article, “The success of the drug development enterprise over the next decade may be at stake.”