Big pharma's partnering plans

Pfizer's Peter Corr told the AusBiotech 2005 conference that big pharma and biotech are part of a delicate ecosystem -- and both have key roles to play.

For someone who has spent so long in the upper echelons of some of the world's most successful companies, Dr Peter Corr has spent a long time looking at failure.

Corr, since 2002 the senior vice-president of science and technology at Pfizer, told the AusBiotech 2005 conference that a large part of any drug firm's role was to establish ways to reduce the attrition rate among its compounds and develop better drug development processes.

That meant, he said, looking at the company's big library of failures. "I often wonder how we ever get a drug to market," he quipped.

The last 20 years has seen a revolution in the pharmaceutical industry. Advances in drug discovery and increased industrialisation haven't created a safer environment for the industry -- in fact, getting a drug to market is more expensive and riskier than ever. And even when a drug does get to market, Corr pointed out, only three in every 10 returns its development costs to the company. Not surprisingly, that makes investors wary -- which has led to a massive consolidation in the industry. In 1988 the US Pharmaceutical Manufacturers Association boasted 42 drug firms among its members. There are now 15.

And underlying it all is the fact that people continue to get sick.

Since 1960, Australians' life expectancy has been increased by more than nine years. But despite the massive impact of better drugs, cardiovascular disease is still the biggest killer in the developed world.

"Both the US and Australia, like the rest of the world, really wrestle with the growth of chronic disease, such as diabetes, depression, AIDS, cardiovascular diseases and avian flu," Corr said. "They are all recognised as threats to health and the healthcare system.

"But I'm convinced we can attack them and win, and the key has always been innovation."

Health and wealth

"There is a direct correlation between health and economic prosperity," Corr said. "Obviously one has to be profitable to increase productivity. Don't think about cost of therapy, but about the cost of disease -- which is much, much greater.

"Even modest reductions in the death rate can produce trillions of dollars in benefit to society. A 10 per cent reduction in deaths from cancer has led to a $4 trillion saving to the US, for example. Regulators should focus on cost burden of disease, rather than the cost of treatment."

Corr, who also spent 18 years as an academic, believes there's really only one option to meeting healthcare challenges in both the developed and the developing worlds -- better therapies.

"This is an exciting time for discovery and development of new therapies," he said. "We have got to increase our new drug productivity."

Big pharma, he said, had to get more compounds to the clinic, with less money -- "and they have to be very good compounds to recoup their investments" -- and reduce their attrition rate. Hence the need to explore why other compounds had failed.

To do all that, he said, drug companies had to look outside themselves for partners, in public research and biotechnology.

"The notion of partnerships isn't just a feelgood idea," he said. "It's essential for preserving a very delicate biomedical ecosystem. Every part of the system, whether it's government policy, pharmaceutical companies, biotech or academia -- if one gets altered, the others are affected. All the segments are critical.

Applauding the Victorian government for its recent support of the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute, Corr said governments had a "pivotal" role in spurring innovation. "The wrong government policies can stifle innovation," he said. "Look at Germany -- when I was growing up it was the medicine chest of the world."

Public policies were essential to advancing innovation, Corr said, through regulatory efficiency and intellectual property ("two things in which Australia excels", he said).

And big pharma wanted to be "the partner of choice" to others in the healthcare sector, Corr insisted. The amount of money big pharma had invested in biotech in the US was up to three times as much as private equity investment in recent years, he said. "And venture capitalists will only invest if there is a vibrant pharmaceutical industry.

"The VC model is not going to take you all the way to the market. So the pharmaceutical industry is a critical component of this industry."

Industry takes note The role and importance of such public/private partnerships also noted in a recent US summit, which featured Microsoft founder Bill Gates and former US president Bill Clinton. At a roundtable discussion, Corr was joined by Paul Herrling, Novartis' head of corporate research, and Adel Mahmoud, Merck & Co's chief medical advisor, vaccines and infections diseases.

"When I think about the problems we face in global health, about availability [of drugs], it's what can we do across the industry and, particularly, in public/private partnerships," said Corr. "I look at what can we do together to make new drugs available -- that means what can we do to discover and develop new drugs. What incentives can we put in place?"

He noted there had been really great public/private partnerships like the Medicines for Malaria Venture and the Global Alliance for TB Drug Development. Novartis is taking a partnership approach with its Novartis Institute for Tropical Diseases (NITD), which is dedicated to finding new drugs for the treatment of tropical diseases including TB and dengue.

Partnerships can also help in other areas. "We can contribute by providing the scientific insights that will make [new drugs] available," said Mahmoud. "We can make a difference if we put our scientific capabilities behind the problem, we will discover something.

"The challenge will be how to deliver vaccines We are struggling today to deliver measles vaccines that have been with us for 30 years."

Mahmoud noted that this is an area where partnerships are already making some progress, as evidenced in the work of the Global Alliance of Vaccination and Immunisation (GAVI).

For the last five years, GAVI has focused on delivering hepatitis B vaccine. "Today two-thirds of newborns -- that means 90 million out of 130 million kids born every year in the world -- are immunised against hepatitis B," said Mahmoud.

-- Additional reporting by Kevin Davies, Bio-IT World