In a new initiative that aims to forge broader partnerships between pharma and academia, Eli Lilly has announced that it will conduct free drug development assays in four therapeutic areas on any compounds academic researchers and small biotechs care to send along. In exchange, the company will get first dibs on any licensing deals or collaborations that promising compounds might yield.

What differentiates this initiative from the plethora of partnering opportunities out there, Alan Palkowitz, Lilly's vice president of Discovery Chemistry Research & Technologies, told The Scientist, is that "in the initial roll-out this is open to an indefinite number of investigators without any preconditions." The idea, he said, is to work with researchers not just in the US and Europe, but worldwide.

The initiative "seems to be very timely," Daphne Zohar, founder and managing partner of PureTech Ventures in Boston, wrote in an email. "There is a great need for collaborations that bridge between academia and industry, particularly since the infrastructure that was feeding pharma's external innovation pipeline has been severely damaged." (Last year, PureTech helped found Enlight Biosciences, a partnership between Pfizer, Merck and Eli Lilly aimed at bringing academic innovation to industry.)

On top of the stifling effect of the current financial climate on biotech, she explained, over the last eight years or so venture firms have moved away from funding academic innovation and towards safer bets from pharma spinouts. That means there's increasingly less opportunity for translating academic research into drug discovery unless pharma actively seeks out the collaborations.

Lilly's Phenotypic Drug Discovery program (PD²) will test any compound it receives in in vitro assays for Alzheimer's disease, diabetes, cancer and osteoporosis -- the company's key therapeutic areas. "These assays mirror what we do internally," said Palkowitz.

For the past 20 years, pharma has increasingly looked to targeted drug development, which tests compounds against a single genomic target in a disease pathway, to fill the drug development pipeline. That approach, the company explained on the program's website, has delivered disappointingly few medicines. PD² will instead rely on phenotypic assays, which test a compound's effect on a broader measure of the disease --- such as anti-angiogenesis in cancer or insulin secretion in diabetes.

Turning to phenotypic assays to test compounds from sources far and wide looks for promising therapies "without making any assumptions of how a compound works," said Joel Kirschbaum, director of the Office of Technology Management at the University of California, San Francisco. He added that the initiative could be particularly interesting for finding new uses for existing compounds.

Palkowitz said that Lilly had partnered with the Association of University Technology Managers, a worldwide organization of university tech transfer officers, to develop a universal material transfer agreement specifying the conditions for researchers to submit their compounds for use by all participating institutions. Once an institution has signed the agreement, any researcher there can participate. "We really examined what are some of the traditional hurdles that existed in setting up some relationships like this," he said, adding that about 65 institutions are already signed on as part of an "early adopters program."

After a university has joined the program, researchers there who want to submit a compound for testing would first enter its chemical structure into a web portal. A computer algorithm will transform the structure into "an electronic fingerprint" that will keep the molecule's structure confidential while allowing the company to make sure the compound isn't one it already has. The company doesn't see the chemical structure of the compound, Palkowitz stressed, in order to allow researchers to maintain control of the IP. "We're trying to save that for later, once we've agreed" that there's something to pursue, he said.

Lilly's will then test the compound, and if it is promising, the two parties will have 120 days to reach an agreement. "Immediately after that maximum 120 days is up, and if no agreement has been reached, the researcher is free to publish," Palkowitz explained, adding that if either the researcher decides not to commercialize the compound or the company decides not to pursue a collaboration, the intellectual property stays with the researcher.


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