Pharma firms to offer up compounds

The Medical Research Council (MRC) announced yesterday that researchers within the UK will be given access to a ’virtual library’ of deprioritised pharmaceutical compounds for use in new studies to improve our understanding of a number of diseases, and help develop new treatments.

A full list of available compounds will be published later this year, when UK scientists will be able to apply for MRC funding to use them in academic research projects, the MRC said.

“We’re now building on this success by expanding into a rolling programme with seven companies

MRC chief executice Sir John Savill

An MRC spokesperson told Laboratorytalk: “We fund academic researchers, so those in UK universities, hospitals and research institutes. We cannot award funding to pharmaceutical firms.”

The seven firms collaborating on this partnership include: AstraZeneca, GlaxoSmithKline, Pfizer, Janssen Research & Development LLC, Lilly, Takeda and UCB.

Though the compounds are seen as ’deprioritised’, it is hoped researchers will be able to find new ways of repurposing them to develop effective new medicines.

Academic researchers will study the compounds so as to better understand how a disease takes hold in the body, and how it could be slowed down or stopped, the MRC said.

As the compounds have already undergone various preliminary developments, it will allow any new treatments arising from the research to reach the market faster.

A similar initiative was announced between AstraZeneca and the MRC in 2011, with the first round of human trials already being conducted.

In that instance, researchers from the University of Manchester repurposed a drug designed originally to treat gastro-oesophageal reflux to improve those suffering from chronic cough.

Chief executive of the MRC Sir John Savill said: “Our ground-breaking compound collaboration with AstraZeneca attracted a huge amount interest from the academic community and saw the MRC award £7 million for research into Alzheimer’s, cancer and rare diseases.

“We’re now building on this success by expanding into a rolling programme with seven companies that will allow the academic community to access even more assets for use in innovative research projects.”

This latest initiative has no fixed budget which means researchers can gain access to the list of compounds on a continuous basis.

As an idea of the possible budget, last year the MRC spent £766.9 million on research, £334.6 million of which was awarded as 1,400 grants to researchers in universities, medical schools and research institutes, the MRC spokesperson said.

Chief executive of the Association of the British Pharmaceutical Industry Stephen Whitehead said: “This partnership between the Medical Research Council and seven pharmaceutical companies is a fantastic example of open innovation that benefits both industry and academia by opening up new interesting avenues for research that may not otherwise be available, or even redirecting towards other diseases.”

Research proposals will be submitted to the MRC, which will independently judge the scientific quality of the applications and award funding accordingly.

“Our funding streams are only available to researchers in the UK - although we do have two research units and fund numerous clinical trials in Africa, as part of our ongoing commitment to global health,” the MRC spokesperson said.