A new chapter in commercial drug discovery was written last week when GlaxoSmithKline said it would share with other researchers its inventory of compounds that show promise for fighting malaria.
Although the British drug giant known as GSK was heralded by leading health organizations, the driving force behind the disclosure was the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
The Gates Foundation has become a catalyst for a new, cooperative approach in commercial drug discovery highlighted by recent agreements for new malaria and tuberculosis studies. The Seattle-based foundation is leveraging its tremendous financial reserves and influence to coax pharmaceutical companies out of their secret laboratories and into public partnerships with other researchers.
“This is the first experiment in this direction by Big Pharma. It is a new paradigm for drug discovery,” said Barry Bunin, CEO of Collaborative Drug Discovery, the California company and Gates Foundation grantee that created the software used by GSK to share its drug compounds.
Combined private and public research efforts could spur development of new medicines for a host of ailments that strike people in both developing and industrialized nations. The collaboration could also give the drug industry the boost it needs as it faces research and development cutbacks, weak sales and the appearance that it doesn’t care about one of the 21st century’s most promising markets: the developing world.
“We believe that this experimental approach into ‘open source’ drug discovery is particularly appropriate to diseases of the developing world, where the commercial opportunities for recouping the costs of research and development do not exist, but the medical need is great,” said Nick Cammack, head of GSK’s Tres Cantos Medicines Development Campus in Spain.
In his 2010 annual letter to the world, Bill Gates identifies drug companies as critical partners in spurring new ways to fight malaria and HIV/AIDS. “Although innovation is unpredictable, there is a lot that governments, private companies and foundations can do to accelerate it,” Gates wrote.
For its part, the Gates Foundation is funding research, hosting regular meetings and even making introductions that bring private industry into new partnerships with humanitarian researchers. To be sure, scientific, population and economic trends are also driving Big Pharma’s growing interest in diseases such as tuberculosis and malaria, but the foundation’s resources are playing a catalytic role.
With $35 billion in assets, the Gates Foundation is the largest private funder of global health organizations and efforts in the world. Not only does it employ several former executives and researchers from the biotech industry, but it also encourages its thousands of health grantees to seek opportunities to work with industry when it is appropriate to their work.
Bunin’s company, Collaborative Drug Discovery, is one of two Gates Foundation grantees that are helping Glaxo-
SmithKline organize and share its malaria drug data. Without the foundation’s funding or connections, Bunin said his company would never have been able to partner with Big Pharma.
“Our introduction (to GSK) was from the Gates Foundation, which carries some weight,” Bunin said.
GlaxoSmithKline is not only using software that was produced by Bunin and underwritten by a Gates Foundation grant, it also screened its library of chemical and biological compounds against the malaria parasite with help from the Medicines for Malaria Venture, a Swiss partnership that has received more than $315 million from the Gates Foundation since 2000.
In March, 10 major pharmaceutical companies announced a partnership to test potential combinations of new tuberculosis drugs as they are developed, under the coordination of the Food and Drug Administration. The partnership, which will be funded in part by the Gates Foundation, is expected to lead clinical trials within a year, said Peter Small, senior program officer who leads the Gates Foundation’s tuberculosis efforts.
He said the foundation played the key role of facilitating the partnership — something no one else in the world could do.
“These are the sorts of discussions that would be difficult for any one individual to initiate,” said Small.
Small said one of the foundation’s key strategies for securing industry collaboration has been to fill gaps in the drug development process that would reduce risk to industry, such as early stage research. That approach could go a long way toward capturing the attention of an industry battered by the recession.
“There are economic pressures on the industry,” said Jim Aiken, president and CEO of Keystone Symposia on Molecular and Cellular Biology, a Colorado nonprofit that invites scientists, policymakers and industry to half a dozen global health conferences each year. The organization has received three Gates Foundation grants worth $4.3 million.
Aiken, who worked in the pharmaceutical industry for 32 years, said with the Gates Foundation providing funding and new awareness for diseases such as malaria, industry is finally coming around.
“There has been a big change in the pharmaceutical industry from when I first started,” said Aiken. “It is hard to quantify the role of the Gates Foundation, but it certainly has made (global health issues) much more visible.”
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