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 at London-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 proper judgements 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.

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 drugdiscovery 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 way of 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

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.

Comments
If you find something abusive or inappropriate or which does not otherwise comply with our Terms or Community Guidelines, please select the relevant 'Report this comment' link. Comments on this thread are vetted after posting. #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 incremental personal gain, for commission is reserved for Sales. All discovery is insubordination. Discovery cannot be spreadsheeted, budgeted, PERTcharted, or parameterized multidimensional DCF/ROI modeled toward prediction. Big Pharma has received what it purchased diversity! Why is it whining? Don't tell chickens how to lay eggs. Fobbing off R&D to smaller scale managerial kingdoms will only be more productive in proportion to managerial oversight failure. We thus arrive at the original discovery model: Basic research looks at interesting stuff without interference. Applied research then pursues with corporate goals oversight. Report this comment 2011-03-02 11:29:47 AM Posted by: "Uncle Al" Schwartz