Here’s a news item that caught my eye today:
Big Drugmakers Pool Resources, Creating New Company Built to Improve R&D
Three of the world’s biggest drugmakers can agree on this—the research and development model for creating new drugs needs a serious kick in the rear. Pfizer, Merck, and Eli Lilly, through a collaboration hatched by Boston-based PureTech Ventures, have agreed to put $39 million into a new Boston company called Enlight Biosciences, whose job will be to create technologies that can enable researchers to make breakthrough drugs.
The venture has attracted very big names. The co-founders include Nobel Laureate H. Robert Horvitz, a biology professor at MIT, and Raju Kucherlapati, a genetics professor at Harvard Medical School who co-founded Millennium Pharmaceuticals and Abgenix. Enlight’s team also includes a pair of PureTech partners with loads of drug industry experience: Frank Douglas, former chief scientific officer at Aventis, and Bennett Shapiro, former executive vice president of basic research and worldwide licensing at Merck.
Enlight’s stated goal is to foster development of new technologies that can help the industry break out of its funk. Despite pumping tens of billions into research and development every year, including $44.5 billion last year according to an industry trade group, the pharmaceutical industry gets a lousy return on that investment. Only 19 new drugs were approved by the U.S. FDA last year, the fewest in 24 years. An estimated one out of every 10 drugs that enters clinical trials ever makes it through the gauntlet of tests to become a marketed product.
“The biopharmaceutical industry has a great need for innovative enabling technologies that will catalyze fundamental transformation of the drug discovery and development process,” said Steven Paul, executive vice president of science and technology for Eli Lilly, in a statement. “A collaborative entrepreneurial initiative such as Enlight that is dedicated to such technological innovation in R&D meets that need in an ideal way.”
Read the rest of the story here.
Big pharma is fertile ground for creative destruction. This venture seems like a very sensible idea to me. However, it should be noted that many researchers in big pharma suffer from the dreaded “NIH” (Not Invented Here) syndrome, so there is no guarantee this venture is going to bear any fruit in the future. It will certainly be worth watching in the months ahead.
