Bridging the chasm between "eureka" moments at the lab bench and new drugs and therapies at the bedside has become an urgent national priority. Despite many billions of dollars spent on biomedical research each year by federal agencies and companies, only about two dozen new drugs are approved in the United States annually, and fewer still make a major dent in fighting disease.
In the biomedical research community, this problem is known as "the valley of death" -- the no man's land where exciting lab results stall while patients desperately wait for breakthroughs. Academic scientists often lack the resources, incentives, and specialized knowledge to push their research forward, and pharmaceutical companies are generally hesitant to take risks on early-stage basic science discoveries.
"Over the last decade, the entire biomedical community has been unable ... to translate billions of dollars of investment to sufficient impact on improvements in health care," said Mikael Dolsten, president of worldwide research and development at Pfizer. "We think it’s really a great opportunity to embark on a change and transformation plan which in the end would be very much enabling patients to get medicine sooner ... and we think we cannot as a company do it in isolation."
Over the last year, Pfizer started Centers for Therapeutic Innovation in San Francisco and New York, and it plans to roll out more on other continents.
Other drug companies are also moving in this direction, motivated by expiring patents on some of their most lucrative drugs and cutbacks in their internal research and development programs. The Dana-Farber Cancer Institute's Belfer Institute for Applied Cancer Science, for example, has partnered with pharmaceutical giants sanofi-aventis and Merck to translate research on cancer targets into useful drugs.
