Pharmas desperately need academic guidance: Cohen

The University of Dundee's Sir Philip Cohen believes that pharmaceutical companies desperately need the help of academic labs, as drug development requires more and more knowledge about biological mechanisms to specifically target drugs.

Cohen's MRC Protein Phosphorylation Unit collaborates with six pharmaceutical companies, including AstraZeneca, Boehringer Ingelheim, GlaxoSmithKline, Merck & Co, Merck KGaA, and Pfizer.

"What they're basically doing is sharing our scientific expertise, gaining access to unpublished results, access to reagents and know how, and first rights to licences of intellectual property, although they have to pay extra for that," he said.

"We're essentially helping them in the first couple of years of drug discovery."

Cohen told delegates at this week's ComBio2004 conference in Perth that advances in the understanding of the roles protein kinases played in cellular signalling pathways had led to the idea that this class of proteins could be targeted by specific drugs. "We realised that we could develop specific inhibitors of these pathways," he said. "In addition to being potentially powerful drugs to treat disease, they are powerful reagents for studying mechanisms."

Now the enzymes have become major targets for drug discovery and development, with hundreds in clinical trials, and two -- Gleevec and Iressa -- on the market.

Cohen's Protein Phosphorylation Unit has a unique relationship with the six companies that support it. The unit does not perform contract research for the companies -- they don't need to as they are well funded.

"We only work on the things we want to do," Cohen said.

The unit has a broad range of capabilities including protein production facilities, cloning and gene expression, antibody production and a kinase profiling service, which can be used to evaluate hits from high throughput screens in order to narrow down promising compounds.

And all information is shared freely with the six companies -- if all six are interested in licensing a particular kinase target for drug discovery, the unit is happy to accommodate them. The exception is when drug companies provide the researchers with their own material, such as compounds in development. In this case, the compounds are not shared.

"From our standpoint, we're in a win-win situation -- for example, inhibitors [as reagents] may be a future source of income for us," Cohen said.

The unit is also setting up its own small drug discovery capabilities -- mostly to explore what Cohen terms "whacky ideas".

The development of the unit has also had a lot of flow on benefits, underpinning the growing local biotech industry in Dundee.

The irony of the position in which the unit now finds is not lost on Cohen.

"I worked for 25 years on protein phosphorylation without any pharmaceutical companies having the slightest interest in my research," he said.