Pharma gets friendly

The biggest drug makers are known for cut-throat competition, not collaboration. But last week Pfizer, Merck and Eli Lilly bucked that trend, announcing the creation of a joint company called Enlight BioSciences to help fund and develop enabling technologies to speed drug development. The company, formed with the help of PureTech Ventures, a venture capital firm in Boston, will seek out and fund linkurl:inventions from academic institutions;http://www.the-scientist.com/article/display/54666/ around the world. "The key bottleneck we're trying to fix here," said Daphne Zohar a board member at Enlight Biosciences and the founder of PureTech Ventures, is bringing the "basic proof of concept to the stage where you have a prototype." There isn't a lot of linkurl:funding;http://www.the-scientist.com/article/display/24577/ in that area currently, she said. The collaborative nature of the company is unusual, said Kenneth Kaitin, director of the Tufts Center for Study of Drug Development. "This is an industry that sharing doesn't come naturally...