By Jeffrey Yip
The pharmaceutical sector’s rapidly rising research and development (R&D) costs could provide spinoff benefits for universities in B.C.
Coupled with the growing inefficiency of the traditional drug development model, those costs are becoming increasingly impractical for large pharmaceutical companies to absorb. They are therefore seeking other avenues for drug and product development.
The senior vice-president for business and strategic affairs at the Centre for Drug Research and Development (CDRD) in Vancouver said big pharma and some big biotech companies are shrinking their internal early development and discovery resources.
“And that’s partly because they have in the recent past not been successful keeping up their pipeline,” said Karimah Es Sabar. “They’ve had all of their big blockbusters come off patent, and they haven’t had an equivalent number of new drug entities come down the pipeline.”
The CDRD helps early drug development projects progress through validation and on to clinical trials.
Big pharma’s old model relied on in-house research and development, which is risky and expensive. Higher costs and falling innovation have consequently pushed pharmaceutical companies to rely more on universities and other post-secondary institutions to supply their pipelines with new drug ideas.
“Big pharma can’t do it all,” said University of British Columbia associate professor David Granville. “So [this trend] alleviates a lot of the risk. The industry is obviously dynamic, so it’s difficult to have expertise in-house for all of the various disease models and interpretation of those models, the results, the data, etc.”
Es Sabar added that big pharma has become too big to innovate.
“Over the years, pharma communities have consolidated and consolidated and merged and mega-merged to death,” Es Sabar said. “They’ve gotten so large they’ve lost the creativity. The real innovation and real creativity and discovery is in academia.”
But this growing trend that’s reshaping the industry comes with a host of challenges.
The gap between academia and big pharma is one example.
Es Sabar said academia’s core values lie in its innovation, creativity and freedom to discover, but big pharma is focused on return on investment.
Simply funding early drug development research coming out of academia wouldn’t be much different from the old model. That’s where organizations such as CDRD or small biotech companies come in.
“Universities use good scientific standards, but not good laboratory practice [GLP] standards, the type of standards done in a company that are under regulatory scrutiny,” said Alan Winter, president and CEO of Genome BC, which uses money from the provincial and federal governments to fund research in molecular biology.
“Validation of discovery is an incredibly expensive effort. And the [CDRD and] biotech companies are generally better at doing that and are much more adept and better at working at the GLP standards.”
Es Sabar agreed with Winter.
She said success in validating new technologies makes discoveries investable, and big pharma can choose to take the drugs through clinical trials and, ultimately, commercialize them.
“So they’re focused more on later development rather than early drug development,” she said. “And they’re looking for a pipeline for early drug development from the academic community.”
But Winter said the industry shouldn’t get too far ahead of itself.
“Even though we see this trend happening, there’s still huge amounts of money that pharmaceutical companies put into drug development,” he said. “ We’re talking $63 billion in the U.S. last year representing 15% to 18% of sales, and it’s only a portion of that that would move toward the academic and biotech world.”
Even so, many in Vancouver’s biotech and life sciences sector believe the trend will become permanent and is strengthening the industry.
“The challenge for us is bringing everyone to the table and managing all of the partners,” Es Sabar said. “It’s getting people to understand that it’s not all or nothing. It’s sharing the risk and sharing the reward. The future is in collaboration and recognizing where each party’s strength lies on that continuum of drug development.”