Big pharma, CRCs can work together: AstraZeneca czar

The thing AstraZeneca finds hardest about its relationship with the Cooperative Research Centre for Chronic Inflammatory Diseases is coping with incompatible timezones.

But that aside, there's more than enough benefit to outweigh the timezone tyranny, AstraZeneca's UK-based global vice-president of respiratory and inflammation research, Dr Rodger MacMillan, told a Melbourne briefing today.

MacMillan, along with the CRC's CEO Prof John Hamilton, was speaking at the BioMelbourne Network's BioBreakfast about the alliance between the two organisations.

"It's obviously a long distance to travel -- I now understand the challenges facing Australian scientists -- but coping with the timezone is probably a bigger challenge. There is little or no overlap in the normal working day," MacMillan said.

AstraZeneca has been the major industry partner for the CRC, which is targeting inflammatory diseases including chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), rheumatoid arthritis and osteoarthritis, since its formation in 2001-02. Other partners include the University of Melbourne, University of Queensland and Monash University, as well as international orthopaedic device company Zimmer and local transgenic group IngenKO.

MacMillan said AstraZeneca had five main considerations for collaborations, including the strategic fit with the company's priority disease areas, the quality of the science, the ability to establish a true working partnership, value for money and location.

Since the merger of Astra and Zeneca, the company has focused on respiratory disease and inflammation as one of four key research priorities, in particular asthma, rheumatoid arthritis, COPD and osteoarthritis, and has concentrated on building its pipeline from discovery to the market.

"The strategic fit is excellent -- there is a focus on rheumatoid arthritis and respiratory disease [in the CRC], and a focus on new therapeutic targets in diseases of strategic importance," MacMillan said. "The science quality is also excellent, with world-class scientists and a centre of excellence in macrophage biology."

He said the two organisations had developed great respect for each other's abilities despite the challenges of communicating across the intersection of academic research and pharmaceutical research.

According to the CRC's Hamilton, one of the benefits of being in partnership with the pharmaceutical company is the opportunity it provides to scientists and students to gain knowledge and experience of pharmaceutical culture, both through regular interactions and through three-month secondments at AstraZeneca.

MacMillan also praised the CRC system, saying it was much more enlightened than European models for academic-industry collaborations. "The CRC is an innovative approach -- I'm not aware of a similar approach anywhere else," he said.

But MacMillan flagged one potential future bone of contention between the CRC and its industrial partner -- the value of the therapeutic targets identified by the CRC once it is ready to pass them over to AstraZeneca for commercialisation. The company has first and last rights of refusal over IP developed by the CRC in the targeted fields, and first rights of refusal for applications falling outside those areas.

"There is no doubt that the CRC will develop validated targets, but the value is not added until the later stages of drug development. There will be arguments I'm sure, as we go into it from different points," he said. The key, he added, would be to have honest debates over the issue when it arises.

MacMillan said that other groups at AstraZeneca in Europe have questioned the wisdom in partnering with Australian researchers, suggesting that the same benefits could be gained from more local collaborations.

"But you can't necessarily get the same quality of science from just down the road," he said.