Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia has joined a group of teaching hospitals as part of an effort by Pfizer (NYSE: PFE) to shrink the time it takes to get a drug through preclinical research and development to a Phase 1 trial. The move is part of a growing trend as pharmaceutical companies look for more efficient ways to expedite drug development and cut down on costs, according to a company statement.
The group includes 21 academic medical centers in the United States, such as Rockefeller University, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and the University of California, San Francisco. Pfizer’s Centers for Therapeutic Innovation network is leading the consortium.
CHOP researchers will collaborate with Pfizer scientists to help identify the most appropriate preclinical research projects with potential applications for antibodies and other molecules targeting a cell surface as opposed to small molecules. The work will be done at Pfizer’s CTI laboratories in New York and Boston. CHOP researchers would submit proposals by April 15 for treatment candidates. In July, the steering committee for the consortium will choose projects for funding.
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Ellen Purpus, the head of CHOP’s office of technology transfer, told MedCity News that its researchers have been given the flexibility to come up with the conditions they would set out to treat ranging from an orphan disease to a broder indication such as pediatric oncology. She said CHOP hasn’t gotten involved in large scale collaborations because it hasn’t been approached. “That’s partially because in pediatrics the (pharmaceutical) markets are much smaller and it can be hard to interest pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies.” But orphan diseases have been a game changer and she added that CHOP is getting more interest on the licensing side.
That timetable will seem like a lightspeed pace compared with the typical schedule for federally sponsored research. Getting a drug to the pre-clinical stage can take as many as 1o years. The goal of Pfizer’s program is to identify cutting-edge areas of research in areas of high unmet need that hold strong potential for therapeutic interventions.
The path to innovation in the pharmaceutical industry has taken many forms as companies try to cut R&D costs and generate novel drug treatments through different types of collaborations. Johnson & Johnson, and Merck have developed incubators to work with drug developers. Big pharma companies are increasingly collaborating with academic institutions and have also developed a consortium in Philadelphia specifically looking at how to reform R&D called TransCelerate Biopharma.
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