MRC’s location problems

London companies PolyThericsand Spirogen collaborate for betterantibody-drug-conjugates (ADCs) in theight against cancer.
The buzz around antibody-drug-conjugates (ADCs), the weapons of choice in the fight against cancer, just became more blatant. After last week’s news that a novel ADC company had been founded in Switzerland. PolyTherics Limited from London (UK) announced on 2 April that it would join in the treasure hunt for promising ADC candidates. Just like the Swiss ADC Therapeutics Sarl, London-seated PolyTherics relies on the cytotoxic agents provided by Spirogen Limited. The two companies want to combine PolyTherics’ linker technology „TheraPEGTM“ with Spirogen’s potent cytotoxic pyrrolobenzodiazepines („PBDs“). The aim is to connect PBDs via the new linker to antibodys or antibody fragments in a site-specific manner. PolyTherics CEO John Burt is enthusiastic: „This is an exciting opportunity to combine our validated conjugation technology with Spirogen’s potentially best-in-class PBD warheads.“ Also Spirogen CEO Chris Martin is convinced the collaboration will bear fruit: „ADCs will represent a significant medical breakthrough in cancer therapy. PolyTherics’ TheraPEGTM conjugation technology will broaden the applications where our PBD warheads and linkers can create highly potent potentially market-leading ADC candidates.“ Spirogen’s PBDs are DNA minor groove binding agents, which bind and cross-link specific DNA-sites. They block cell division in the targeted (cancer) cells without distorting their DNA helix, thus avoiding the common phenomenon of emergent drug resistance.

London - The not-for-profit UK Biobank, the most comprehensive health study in Britain, is now accessible to researchers from industry and academia. The resource, which contains some 1,000 pieces of health and lifestyle information approx 500,000 participants aged 40-69 when they joined the four-year project, will continue to be updated with additional information and the results of research carried out on its data. It currently contains about 20 TB (terabytes) of securely stored data.
Amongst the half a million Britons delivering data, are 26,000 people with diabetes and 50,000 with joint disorders, 41,000 teetotallers, and 11,000 heart attack patients. Scientists will be granted access to the data if they can show that their research is health-related and in the public interest. They do not have to be from or based in the UK, and it will not matter if they are from academia, industry, charities or governments. Successful applications will be published on the website, www.ukbiobank.ac.uk. UK Biobank is funded by the Wellcome Trust, Medical Research Council, Department of Health, Scottish Government, Welsh Government and the British Heart Foundation. Professor Sir Mike Rawlins, chair of the UK's National Institute of Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE), has been announced as chairman of the organisation, replacing Sir Alan Langlands, chief executive of the Higher Education Funding Council for England, and former CEO of the NHS, who over the past eight years has steered the project through its establishment and early phases.

Amsterdam/London – Two pharma majors have announced on BIO-Europe Spring (Amsterdam) to back the launch of a €150m life science investment fund, managed by Index Ventures. The investment backed by Johnson&Johnson and GlaxoSmithKline represents a new pharmaceutical-VC partnership model intended to propel early stage pre-competitive innovation. The fund includes investments from several of Index’s largest existing limited partners, which can capitalise on the shared expertise of GSK and J&J through their participation in the fund’s scientific advisory board. “The endeavor we are taking to discover new drugs is enormous. It’s key for us to reach out to any new ideas anywhere in the world,” said Moncef Slaoui, Chairman R&D, GSK. “We need to capture the diversity of ideas and talent.” With the investment into early biotech research pharma companies want to fill the productivity gap in their own pipelines. According to figures published by Eli Lilly advisor Bernhard Munos in Forbes, pharma companies currently have to invest between US$4bn to US$11bn to bring a new entity to the market.

London – The British Wellcome Trust announced on 20 March that it will launch a £200m business to invest directly in healthcare and life sciences companies. The business, up to now running under its working title Project Sigma, will draw its initial capital from the trust’s endowment. „Although Sigma has the primary goal of generating excellent returns for the Wellcome Trust, its investments will also provide emerging businesses in the healthcare sector with a valuable new source of funding and guidance“, the Wellcome Trust stated. In recent years, the charity, which hands out £600 million in research grants every year and has a £14 billion endowment, has substantially increased its private equity holdings. On 30 September 2011 it has invested £2.7bn in venture capital firms. The trust has recruited Martin Murphy, previously a partner at venture capital firm MVM Life Science Partners, as Sigma’s chief executive and Oxford Instruments and Deltex Medical chairman Nigel Keen to chair Sigma’s board. As everywhere, British biotech start-ups are struggling to find new funding, and venture capital players have been called conservative in their investments in drug developers in recent years. Therefore, new funding mechanisms are met with cheers. Glyn Edwards, interim chief executive at the BioIndustry Association trade body, expects a significant boost to companies developing new medicines: „It is especially pleasing to see that the fund will take a long term view and provide companies with the support they need to reach their full potential.”

Nanopore sequencer Oxford Nanopore Technologies, a UK firm that promises its third-generation technology could theoretically sequence a human genome in 15 minutes, impressed scientists with the first public presentation of its data on 17 February at the “Advances in Genome Biology and Technology” meeting in Marco Island, Florida (US). The firm’s “Strand sequencing” technology identifies bases in real time by measuring electrical conductivity as a DNA strand is fed through a biological nanopore. The Grid­ION system comprises scalable nodes that contain array chips for multi-nano­pore sequencing of single strands, allowing the user to choose a run time between minutes and days. The initial version, which will be available this year, is designed for real-time sequencing by 2,000 nanopores at once to deliver tens of giga­bits of data per 24 hours. Oxford said that an 8,000-nanopore GridION configuration, which the company asserts could perform whole genome sequencing in 15 minutes, will be available in early 2013. Oxford Nanopore said that GridION will be sold at a price-per-base “as competitive as other leading systems at launch.” The company also said that MinION, a miniature version of the platform, will be available this year. Nano­pore sequencing has the potential to achieve read lengths of up to 10,000 bases, ten times more than the best current platforms. Additionally, the technology promises more cost-effectiveness than current sequencing methods which all are dependent on costly fluorescence cameras and labels. A second application dubbed “Exonuclease sequencing”, which includes enzymatic DNA cleavage, has been partnered with US firm Illumina Inc.

GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) is further strengthening its activity in the area of rare diseases. The London-based pharma giant has signed an early-stage deal to develop and commercialise treatments for lysosomal storage disorders (LSDs). To that end, it has signed a global collaboration with Canadian bio­tech company Angiochem for upwards of US$300m (€223.7m) to help GSK develop blood-brain barrier (BBB)-crossing enzyme replacement therapies that could for the first time address the CNS symptoms of such diseases. The deal will see Montreal-based Angiochem, which specialises in getting peptide compound drugs past the BBB, to create and develop at least one product for a specified LSD. GSK will assume all development and commercial­isation rights to the product. According to Angiochem CEO Jean-Paul Castaign, around 50 rare LSDs have been described so far, and about 20 have central nervous system symptoms that are left unaddressed by current therapies. These are the symptoms that the two companies hope to be able to treat for the first time, along with the peripheral symptoms that to a certain extent can be treated with existing therapies. Angio­chem is also developing brain anti-cancer drugs in partnership with Geron.

London/Montreal - Angiochem will collaborate with British pharma trust GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) plc on treatments for lysosomal storage diseases (LSD). London-based GSK will pay $300m, including up to $31.5m in upfront cash and research funding. The cooperation comes as a small surprise, as it was only earlier this month when GSK announced, after a major re-adjustment of R&D budgets and structures, that it wanted to stick to its in-house R&D. Angiochem's field of expertise is the creation of therapeutics which can pass the blood-brain barrier (BBB). The collaboration agreement explicitly lists EPiC-enzymes as the means of choice to penetrate the BBB and to restore enzyme function in the central nervous system. LSDs are rare genetic diseases. Currently about 50 different forms are known. However, which LSD is covered by the deal has not been disclosed. If the approach turns out to be successful, the liaison might be expanded to include additional LSD targets. Angiochem would then be eligible to receive royalties on sales of EPiC- enzymes that arise from the collaboration. Jean-Paul Castaigne, president and CEO of Angiochem, emphasises the clinical goal: “Our collaboration with GSK reflects our belief in the need to effectively address neurological symptoms of lysosomal storage diseases." However, it is also anticipated that an effective EPiC-enzyme drugs will appeal to the peripheral symptoms of LSDs, too. Over a year ago, Angiochem teamed up with notorious Geron Corporation from Menlo Park (USA) in a similar deal to work on two oncology product categories (taxanes and telomerase inhibitors) crossing the BBB.

London - GlaxoSmithKline re-adjusts its €3.7bn R&D budget. Following a review, three of 38 R&D units will be cut and four new ones installed, the UK drug company said in a statement on 7 Februray. Furthermore, six of the discovery units (DPUs) will get more money over the next years, while the budget of five will be cut. The shakeup is the outcome of a review started in November 2011. A panel of GSK executives and external experts heard presentations from the majority of its 38 DPUs. Scientists from each unit told the panel what they want to do over the next three years. In 2008 GSK broke up its R&D operations in tightly knit research groups of five to 70 scientists, who have to win their three-year based on performance. GSK is not the only one to look for a new R&D approach. British-Swedish rival Astra Zeneca hopes on outside innovation. Recently it announced that it will shift the search for external pre-Phase III assets into R&D, in a move to make the more and more important business development more science driven. GSK relies more on in house R&D and thinks it is on the right way. "I am very pleased with the energy, approach and productivity we are seeing from our scientists in these units", says Andrew Witty, CEO of GSK. Indeed, the return rate on the money spent on late stage pipeline projects was 11%. In 2011 it climbed o 12%, and Witty has declared he wants to push that rate to the 14% mark in the near future. Alas, even GSK is not immune against the odds of the pharmaceutical development business. On the same day of the announcement of the R&D successes GSK said that it had paused enrolment in its current Phase IIb clinical trials of GSK2251052 (GSK ‘052) for the treatment of complicated urinary tract infections due to a recently identified microbiological finding.

London - AstraZeneca tries to shed some weight, anticipating a tough year ahead. 7,300 jobs will be gone soon, the Anglo-Swedish drug company said in a statement. Research and development operations will be cancelled in Södertälje, Sweden, as well as Montreal, Canada. In Södertalje, the company runs a series of state of the art biotechnical laboratories, mainly for research in the fields of therapy for the Central Nervous System (CNS) and Pain Control. Where the rest of the 5,100 job will vanish is not yet specified. AstraZeneca wants to get slimmer on a global scale, it is reducing the regional management groups from five to three - North America, Europe and Asia/Pacific. It is the third round of layoffs since 2007, bringing the total up to 28,900. On first look, the cuts seem counter-intuitive as the drugmaker reported a 24 percent increase in 2011 profits to €7.6bn. "We have announced further steps to drive productivity in all areas to improve returns on our investment in innovation”, CEP David Brennan commented. He cites generic competition and reduced government reimbursement schemes as main drivers for the move. AstraZeneca wants to save €1.2bn by 2014.

Newhouse – An example of Schumpeter's dictum of creative destruction can be witnessed in Scotland. A former research site of US-pharma company Merck will be reborn as a biotech science park. BioCity Scotland Ltd, a joint venture between BioCity Nottingham and Roslin BioCentre, announced the acquisition of the 23 acre site at Newhouse in Lanarkshire. It was closed last year as part of Merck Inc’s global R&D downsizing. It comprises 130,000 sq ft of purpose built laboratories and office space and is located between the city centres of Glasgow and Edinburgh. "BioCity Nottingham’s success in nurturing and growing over 70 new companies since 2003, and Roslin’s expertise in life sciences innovation and facilities management makes this team the perfect commercial partnership", said Louis J. Nisbet, Chairman of BioCity Scotland. The site has already signed up its first two tenants, and hopes to create as many as 500 jobs at the location. A total of 250 jobs were lost after Merck (known as Merck Sharp & Dohme in Europe) announced its closure in July 2010.