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Pharmaceuticals

A Drug Discovery Knowledge Gap

Industry leaders cite a need to learn the mechanisms of disease

by RICK MULLIN AND VIVIEN MARX
August 16, 2004 | A version of this story appeared in Volume 82, Issue 33

MULTIPRONGED
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Credit: PHOTO BY RICK MULLIN
Zerhouni emphasizes multidisciplinary approach to drug discovery.
Credit: PHOTO BY RICK MULLIN
Zerhouni emphasizes multidisciplinary approach to drug discovery.

CONFERENCE

Government, industry, and academic representatives at IBC Life Science's 9th Annual World Congress on Drug Discovery Technology in Boston last week called for a heightened effort to better understand the biological mechanisms of disease. Such an endeavor, they said, will require increased interdisciplinary research at drug companies, better cooperation between universities and industry, and information management to support an increasingly collaborative, data-intensive enterprise.

Opening keynote speaker Elias A. Zerhouni, director of the National Institutes of Health, called for "multipronged" strategies to address the challenge of developing drugs for chronic diseases. In describing NIH's Roadmap for Medical Research in the 21st century, Zerhouni said multidisciplinary teams with access to public databases of chemical reactions must gain a greater ability to predict the behavior of biological systems.

Zerhouni told of a recent meeting at which he asked biotech CEOs how much they knew about the diseases their firms were trying to treat. "They admitted they only knew about 10% of what they need to know," Zerhouni said. "With $50 billion spent on drug discovery, something is missing. And that something is knowledge."

Mark Fishman, president of Novartis Institutes for Biomedical Research, called for a greater focus on systems biology. "The genome was oversold," he told attendees, adding that a "new framework" needs to be established for drug discovery, organized around the study of molecular pathways. The "next wave in the genome project," he said, must be the accumulation of knowledge about the function of genes.

New paradigms in drug discovery, according to David Baltimore, president of California Institute of Technology, will include the fusion of diagnostics with therapeutics, and biotechnology with nanotechnology. Cell and gene therapy are on the new frontier, he told attendees, bringing adult stem cell and embryonic stem cell research center stage.

Janet White, senior director of business operations at Pfizer's R&D center in La Jolla, Calif., told C&EN that major drug companies need to incorporate innovative discovery techniques while continuing work in therapeutic target areas that they are familiar with. She noted, however, that work in uncharted target areas requires strong support from a management "champion," given the high risk of failure.

Industry players agree that better communic ation is needed between scientific disciplines and between business and academia. Christine Fischette, executive director for global business development and licensing at Novartis, said at a conference session on partnering that poor communication between partners is often "the stone around the neck" of important big pharma/biotech collaborations. Vendors of database management systems exhibiting at the world congress, including Lion Bioscience and MDL Information Systems, have new "open architecture" systems they say target emerging collaborative needs.

Despite concern over disconnects, Fishman told C&EN that academic researchers want to engage with industry. "My friends in academia are ready to make medicines," he says. "Maybe it has something to do with turning 50. We are all comfortable working in the public domain."

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