Bridging the chasm between “eureka’’ moments at the lab bench and the development and use of new drugs at the bedside has become an urgent national priority. In the biomedical research community, this problem is known as “the valley of death’’ — where exciting lab results stall while patients desperately wait for breakthroughs.
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.
“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,’’ Mikael Dolsten, president of worldwide research and development at Pfizer, said in an interview. “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.’’
Until now, there’s been limited collaboration between academic and industry researchers on early-stage drug development projects. The arrangements are usually made between individual labs and are not on the scale of the new initiative. New York-based Pfizer has also started Centers for Therapeutic Innovation in San Francisco and New York within the past year and has plans to expand the model to other countries.
Other drug companies are also moving in this direction, motivated by overall industry trends: 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.
