Steve Rees :
VP Screening Sciences and Sample Management
AstraZeneca

In recent years there has been increased investment in drug discovery in academia to enable the translation of basic research into drug discovery programs and hence economic value. To enable this universities and funding bodies have established a number of lead discovery centres with the expertise and infrastructure to perform lead discovery, typically through high throughput screening (HTS). These centres aim to identify chemical probes to be used to better understand the role of the target in disease or chemical starting points for the initiation of lead optimization programs. The largest such investment has been the NIH Chemical Genomics initiative in the USA, and has been complemented by the growth of screening centres in the UK including the Medical Research Council Technology Centre for Therapeutic Discovery, the Dundee Drug Discovery Unit and the Cancer Research Technology Drug Discovery Centre. Alongside this the European Union has made significant investments in chemical biology through the EU Openscreen and with the recently established European Lead Factory (ELF). The success of these centres has been facilitated by a knowledge transfer from pharma as a result of downsizing within the industry, however this has been somewhat limited by the quality of the available compound collections, and of available high throughput screening infrastructure. Interestingly these problems are being addressed in the ELF which has established a compound collection derived from the collections of the pharma partners, and is based in the former Compound Management and HTS facilities of Schering Plough.

While academic, government and charity bodies continue to invest in novel biology in the hope of finding new targets, there remains a strategic gap to support the translation of novel target biology into sustainable drug discovery projects. This is limited by the quality of academic compound libraries and the paucity of expertise in HTS and other hit discovery paradigms throughout academia. For this reason AstraZeneca has established collaborations with leading academic screening centres including the Medical Research Council Technology in the UK and the Lead Discovery Centre of the Max-Planck in Dortmund, Germany in which these centres access high quality compounds sets from the AstraZeneca compound library for screening in their facilities. In exchange AstraZeneca gains first option to in-license the resulting drug discovery programs. Building upon the success of these initiatives the recently launched Open Innovation Portal will enable academics from across the globe to access research capabilities in AstraZeneca (http://openinnovation.astrazeneca.com). Similar initiative shave been established by other companies including the Discovery Partners in Academia program at GlaxoSmithKline and the Lilly PD2 program.

To further develop the model of partnership between industry and academia, with the objective of enabling the translation of academic discovery into successful drug discovery projects AstraZeneca has recently announced a ground-breaking agreement with the UK Medical Research Council (MRC) to create the AstraZeneca / MRC UK Centre for Lead Discovery. This facility will be established within the new AstraZeneca Research and Development building on the Cambridge Biomedical Campus (CBC) due to open in 2016. It will see world class MRC-supported researchers working side-by-side with AstraZeneca scientists identifying new methods to better understand a range of diseases and potential treatment options.

As part of the collaboration, which will run for an initial period of five years, academic researchers will benefit from unprecedented access to over two million molecules in AstraZeneca’s compound library, as well as its state-of-the-art high throughput screening and chemistry facilities at the new site. Research proposals will be submitted to the MRC that will independently assess and select the best scientific proposals from a broad range of therapy areas and diseases. The MRC will place biologists and chemists within the AstraZeneca / MRC UK Centre for Lead Discovery. The biologists will work alongside scientists from the AstraZeneca HTS group; the chemists will establish a hits-to-leads chemistry capability to support MRC funded projects. This will be a unique capability that will enable academic scientists to access industry leading capability for the optimization of hit molecules to drug-like leads.