According to the news source, drug majors are increasingly looking towards the academia to overcome limited late-stage pipelines and failures in drug development. Rise in generic competition for top-selling drugs and shortage in the drug development pipeline are said to be the prime reasons behind the sudden focus on the industry-academia partnership.
Recently, GlaxoSmithKline has signed a five-year, $25 million deal with Harvard to support stem-cell research, particularly in the areas of heart disease and cancer. AstraZeneca, the UK-based pharmaceutical company, has partnered with Columbia University to develop novel therapeutics for metabolic diseases. Pfizer has also entered into a three-year, $14 million collaboration with four research universities in diabetes research.
On the other hand, the universities are also keen on partnering with drug companies to boost their dwindling financial sources because of cuts in governmental funding due to rising inflation.
This mutual need for each other has also led to a change in the research partnerships. The new ventures now involve joint efforts from university and industry scientists towards new drug discovery and advancement in basic research.
The Financial Times quoted Jan Lundberg, executive vice president of global discovery research at AstraZeneca, as saying: “The new agreements also differed from past partnerships because they laid out clearly how patents were arranged, as well as how publication rights were handled.”