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Deep future of drug discovery

For GlaxoSmithKline's research chief Patrick Vallance, drug

development unites in-house depth with external breadth.

Daniel Cressey

Patrick Vallance.GlaxoSmithKline

The pharmaceutical industry is undergoing its biggest shake-up in decades,

and Patrick Vallance is in the thick of it.

As senior vice-president of medicines discovery and development atLondon-based drug company GlaxoSmithKline, Vallance plays a central part

in shaping research policy at the company.

Nature spoke to him about the changing relationship between industry and

academia, and the prospects for new models of drug discovery (see

'Traditional drug-discovery model ripe for reform').

What balance is GSK striking between in-house drug discovery and

external research conducted by biotechnology companies or

academic researchers?

Internal drug discovery is important. With the best will in the world, much

of the external drug-discovery work leaves quite significant gaps.

If you look at many academic labs, they know the things that aren't necessarily

put in papers.

People have asked whether you can you go completely external. I don't

think you can because I think you lose the ability to make properjudgements about what you think is going to work and why you think it's

going to work. We think 50/50 internal/external research is about right.

How do you collaborate with external researchers?

With biotech firms, we're looking for a partnership. We're buying in the

expertise that they have, and the different ways they have of doing things.

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We're deliberately hands-off.

If you look at many academic labs, they know the things that aren't

necessarily put in papers. GSK is not going to have 15 years' experience

with one target like they have, because we move from target to target.What we do have is real expertise in turning that target into a medicine.

The idea is to unite those two strengths and tie ourselves together in a

milestone-driven partnership. That way we play to each other's strengths

and instead of it being a cash transfer, we're actually working together.

What role is there for open innovation, where collaborative drug

research is published openly without the constraints of intellectual

property?

We have certainly done some things in that space. For example, we

screened an entire collection of 13,000 compounds that kill malaria

parasites, and put that in the public domain to try to create a virtual drug-

discovery effort. People can access that, put their own information back,

and we'll build a drug-discovery paradigm together.

We don't know whether it works, we don't know whether the worldwide

scientific community will play ball and put that information back in the

public domain. I do think that if that turns out to be a more effective wayof making medicines, we will have to think about the business model that

allows you to do it in other areas.

How has GSK been changing its research model?

We wanted to move away from the situation where big pharma has got

stuck, covering a very broad range of areas but not going very deep in the

areas you want to be in. We've created 30 or so 'discovery performance'

units, which focus on selected areas of novel, cutting-edge science where

we want to be making medicines. These are small units of 40 or 50

scientists, integrating chemists, biologists, clinicians and pharmaceutical

experts, who act like an expert biotech company.

We've elected to be deep into those areas internally, and to add the

breadth by partnering with specialist external biotech companies. We think

the model gives us both depth and breadth, instead of breadth with a

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shallow understanding of the biology.

What risks do these changes present?

There is a huge amount of expertise within big pharma. Changing to new

models without destroying that expertise is something people have to be

very careful of. I think the United Kingdom in particular now has got an

issue and the Pfizer closure (see 'Pfizer slashes R&D') is an example

where we could be in danger of losing a very skilled workforce that you

can't replicate overnight. It's a very special skill set that isn't present in

academia, and is not always present in biotech.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

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#18482 Human Resources hires zero-risk mediocrities by the book.Research management imposes closely supervised zero risk pursuit by the

book. A researcher who scores a billion drug realizes no incrementalpersonal gain, for commission is reserved for Sales. All discovery isinsubordination. Discovery cannot be spreadsheeted, budgeted, PERT-charted, or parameterized multidimensional DCF/ROI modeled towardprediction. Big Pharma has received what it purchased diversity! Why is itwhining? Don't tell chickens how to lay eggs. Fobbing off R&D to smallerscale managerial kingdoms will only be more productive in proportion tomanagerial oversight failure. We thus arrive at the original discoverymodel: Basic research looks at interesting stuff without interference.Applied research then pursues with corporate goals oversight.

Report this comment2011-03-02 11:29:47 AMPosted by: "Uncle Al" Schwartz