Bold move by Astra Zeneca to share 22 early stage potential drugs with MRC

By Dr. Ananya Mandal, MDDec 6 2011

Drug maker AstraZeneca will be sharing 22 of its early-stage research compounds with the Medical Research Council as part of a make over of life sciences research. This would speed up patients’ access to breakthrough drugs and arrest the decline of research and development in the UK.

Among the compounds which AstraZeneca has agreed to share, half have already been tested on humans. They are useful in key areas as prostate cancer, schizophrenia, diabetes and Alzheimer’s disease.

AstraZeneca will however retain ultimate rights to the compounds, even though it had shelved development prior to this agreement. It is the first company with which the MRC has reached agreement, although it is hoped others will follow in sharing early-stage molecules. Chris Watkins, head of translation research at the MRC, said that he had been in talks with six to ten pharmaceutical companies over the last two years.

MRC chief executive Sir John Savill said it “marks a new era in medical discovery, open innovation and public-private collaboration”. Universities and science minister David Willetts called the agreement a ‘real boost’ for British science. “This will keep the UK at the very forefront of biomedical research and drive growth and innovation in our life sciences industry,” he added.

The manufacturer points out the fact that its compounds “have taken millions of pounds to develop so far”, and says the new collaboration is “crucial to our ability to find solutions to society’s unmet medical needs”. The average sector cost of bringing a new medicine to market was £630 million this year, so making compounds available to outside researchers while retaining some rights over them makes sense for AstraZeneca.

David Brennan, AstraZeneca’s chief executive, said, “We hope that in sharing these valuable compounds with academic scientists through the MRC, new discoveries will be made by exploring additional uses of these compounds.” “In today’s resource-constrained environment, external collaborations such as these provide a means to test a compound across a range of therapeutic indications with underlying rationale,” an AstraZeneca spokesman told Pharmafocus. “These may include niche, less-commercially attractive, but viable patient populations,” he added. Compounds that undergo early trials are often then put on hold for a variety of reasons, and researchers will benefit from access to information and resources that they would not otherwise have.

This comes along with Prime Minister, David Cameron’s announcement of plans to make the UK a more efficient base for scientific research; £180 million has been earmarked for the so-called Biomedical Catalyst Fund and a further £130 million for a second fund. He said, “The financial crisis is affecting healthcare budgets in the West, many blockbuster drugs are nearing the end of their patents, and new biological insights have dramatically altered the landscape of discovery and development.”