Charity Gives Life to Languishing Drugs

As part of an innovative profit-sharing program, the London-based charity Cancer Research UK (CRUK) has been partnering with industry to bring sidelined and novel drugs into clinical trials for cancer. In December, the charity's drug development office and its development and commercialization arm, Cancer Research Technology, announced the ninth such partnership since 2007—an agreement with AstraZeneca to take the experimental asthma drug AZD2098 into a clinical trial for kidney cancer.

Victoria John, head of clinical partnerships at CRUK, says that the program grew out of the charity's longstanding history of taking academic research to the clinic through its drug development office, which runs early-stage clinical trials and works with industry to commercialize promising treatments. Several years ago, the group realized that it was not just in academia that potential drugs were languishing. In industry, too, John says, “very promising agents were actually deprioritized and left sitting on the shelf.”

Under the Clinical Development Partnerships program, experimental treatments are taken from preclinical testing through early-stage clinical trials at no expense to the company. When the trials conclude, the company has the option to acquire the clinical trial data and move the treatment into development. If so, the company shares any revenue with CRUK. If not, it gives up the intellectual property rights to the treatment so that CRUK can find another commercial partner.

John says the experimental therapies are selected through a rigorous scientific review process. In addition to deprioritized treatments at major pharmaceutical companies, the program also looks at new treatments at biotech companies that have not been advancing as quickly as they could, either because the company lacks money or oncology expertise, or because the drug has a small market.

AstraZeneca discontinued development of AZD2098 for asthma in 2005, but the drug is now getting renewed attention. It targets CCR4, a protein receptor that was recently identified as a potential target in kidney and other cancers by Frances Balkwill, a cancer researcher at Barts Cancer Institute and Queen Mary University of London.

So far, six of the nine treatments taken up under the Clinical Development Partnerships program have entered clinical trials. John says that two of those trials have recently closed, and the data is under review. In the next few months, she says, “we very much hope that we'll be in a position for those companies to take them back, or for us to secure an alternate license partner to take them forward.”