Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
For one company, the total partnering budget in 2005 for preclinical collabo-
ration projects amounted to £26.5 m. Another company had extensive partnering
experience and the products from partnering underpinned revenues, with “38% of
revenues arising from licensed-in products or technologies (particularly vaccines)
and up to 50% of products dependent on licensed-in elements”. In some cases,
products had been developed through multiple partnerships. An example cited was
the hepatitis vaccine developed by Merck & Co., which involved patent licenses
from three universities and three companies covering elements such as constructs
of viral protein, cell lines and adjuvants.
The academic Alternative Drug Discovery project at Imperial College (Imperial
aADI) (Box 1) and the Kinase Consortium at Dundee University (Box 1) were
specifically mentioned by a majority of those interviewed as being highly successful
university-industry partnerships — the latter was considered by many of the key
informants as the gold standard of pre-competitive research grouping.
Box 1. Examples of university industry R&D partnership structures.
Dundee Kinase Consortium
The University of Dundee's School of Life Sciences has been partnering with
pharmaceutical companies since 1998 in a £20 million plus programme spanning
10 years, aimed at developing new drugs to fight serious illnesses such as diabetes,
rheumatoid arthritis and cancer. The project was initiated to support Wellcome
Trust-funded research and Scottish Enterprise-funded commercialisation activity
in the laboratory of Professor Sir Philip Cohen, Director of the MRC protein
phosphorylation unit. It has enabled Dundee to accumulate the largest collection
in the world of drug targets, reagents and know-how relating to protein kinases and
phosphatases (http://www.biodundee.co.uk press release of 31st March 2005).
GSK's Academic Alternative Discovery Initiative at Imperial
This collaborative research funding framework and alliance management agree-
ment was initiated following introductory meetings between GSK and Imperial
College London scientists in 2003. The aim is to increase innovation in GSK's R&D
by offering a series of partnering opportunities along selected themes. The frame-
work provides overarching agreement on IP terms, project costs and alliance man-
agement, together with terms of reference for the joint steering committee. Once
GSK has allocated its annual budget for the programme, Imperial's university sci-
entists are invited to meet with GSK's company scientists to identify potential areas
of collaboration and present outline research proposals for screening by the Steer-
ing Group. Selected project proposals proceed through the GSK in-house planning
process, facilitated by an alliance manager based at Imperial. As a result, GSK is
able to tap into the multi-disciplinary science base at Imperial and Imperial receives
additional funding and access to know-how for industrial drug discovery.
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