An effort by the National Institutes of Health's National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences to connect academic researchers with industry to revive drugs that passed safety testing but failed for their initial treatment indications has signed on 5 additional pharmaceutical companies.

An effort by the NIH National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (NCATS) to connect academic researchers with industry to revive drugs that passed safety testing but failed for their initial treatment indications has signed on 5 additional pharmaceutical companies.

Early-adopters AstraZeneca, Eli Lilly, and Pfizer, who backed the Discovering New Therapeutic Uses for Existing Molecules program at its launch in May, are being joined by Abbott, Bristol-Meyers Squibb, GlaxoSmithKline, Janssen Pharmaceutical Research and Development, and Sanofi.

In fiscal year 2013, the program will provide up to $20 million to fund 2- to 3-year cooperative research grants that propose to investigate new therapeutic uses for any of the 58 compounds provided by the corporate partners.

The initiative “provides the opportunity to tap into the collective brain power of scientists across the United States and match a great scientific idea with the right industry compound,” says program director Christine Colvis, PhD, of NCATS.

In addition, the pilot program's template agreements for intellectual property rights “will significantly reduce the amount of time it takes for each of the partners to negotiate the terms,” says Colvis.

For corporate partners looking to take advantage of external research talent, the program makes perfect sense. “We're a very small percentage of the total knowledge base,” says Donald Frail, PhD, vice president of Science New Opportunities at AstraZeneca Innovative Medicines in Waltham, MA. “It's been a very intentional strategy by AstraZeneca to implement open innovation paradigms and tap into that expanded knowledge.”

Standard templates for memos of understanding (MOU) and collaborative research agreements (CRA) are key ingredients in the Discovering New Therapeutic Uses for Existing Molecules pilot program. The agreements aim to streamline partnerships and provide a roadmap for handling intellectual property.
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Standard templates for memos of understanding (MOU) and collaborative research agreements (CRA) are key ingredients in the Discovering New Therapeutic Uses for Existing Molecules pilot program. The agreements aim to streamline partnerships and provide a roadmap for handling intellectual property.

Standard templates for memos of understanding (MOU) and collaborative research agreements (CRA) are key ingredients in the Discovering New Therapeutic Uses for Existing Molecules pilot program. The agreements aim to streamline partnerships and provide a roadmap for handling intellectual property.
View largeDownload slide

Standard templates for memos of understanding (MOU) and collaborative research agreements (CRA) are key ingredients in the Discovering New Therapeutic Uses for Existing Molecules pilot program. The agreements aim to streamline partnerships and provide a roadmap for handling intellectual property.

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Six months ago, AstraZeneca joined a similar partnership program with the Medical Research Council in the United Kingdom. “We're at the stage of collaborating on full proposals now and we're excited about that,” says Frail.

Additional NIH-funded efforts to re-engineer the drug development pipeline to encourage earlier and more extensive collaborations are likely, according to Colvis.

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©2012 American Association for Cancer Research.
2012