Pfizer Head of R&D Talks Strategy on How Pharma Chooses Compounds to Bet A Billion Dollars On
June 16, 2016
By Mark Terry, BioSpace.com Breaking News Staff
How pharmaceutical companies decide which compounds to pursue in oncology—or any area—given a 10 to 20-year timeframe for development can be a complicated problem. Business Insider recently talked to Bob Abraham, Pfizer ’s head of oncology research and development to get a sense of how Pfizer approaches compound selection.
Abraham, who is also a professor of pharmacology at the University of California San Diego, says, “Everything we do stands on the shoulder of academia, basically. We have to keep a close eye on the huge volume of academic research out there. We have to keep a particular eye on blips on the radar screen, things that are just starting to merge, before they become so public that 17 pharmaceutical companies are going after the same target.”
Drug companies often collect giant libraries of chemical compounds that they test. Late last year, AstraZeneca and Sanofi (SNY) traded 210,000 compounds from their libraries, which gave them new molecules to test. Utilizing high-throughput screening technology, they can then test the compounds on various cells or molecules, looking for specific reactions.
In some cases, Indiana Jones-like medicine hunters search the world for new plants, herbal remedies, algae, bacteria, fungi, etc., that can be tested.
Companies that plan on spending one or two decades and potentially in excess of a billion dollars on developing drugs that may or may not make it to market, approach drug selection from a variety of different angles. And that, Abraham says, is “right up there with the hardest things that we do. You’re not going to be right all the time. You have to be willing to say ‘OK, we gave this a really good shot and it didn’t work,’ and we move on and we don’t look back and regret. We do try to learn from failure, but if you’re going to be in the front of the pack, you have to be willing to take on those risks.”
And, of course, they buy compounds or biotech companies that are developing and testing new drugs or chemicals that are already showing promise. For example, there is speculation that Pfizer might buy Agenus (AGEN), which has AGEN1884, an anti-CTLA-4 antibody against solid tumors in development. But Incyte (INCY) and Merck (MRK) already have partnerships in place, so any one of them, or none, might consider it a good investment.
Pfizer recently acquired Palo Alto, California-based Anacor Pharmaceuticals (ANAC) for $5.2 billion. In the process, it picks up Anacor’s flagship project, crisaborole, a non-steroidal topical PDE4 inhibitor to treat mid-to-moderate atopic dermatitis, better known as eczema.
And on May 5, Pfizer inked a deal with Cambridge, Massachusetts-based WAVE Life Sciences (WVE) to develop up to five programs from discovery to clinical candidate selection. At that point, Pfizer will have the option to exclusively license the programs and continue development.
In many ways, drug development is a high-stakes, long-term gamble, and like any good gambler, successful pharmaceutical companies don’t place all their time and money on a single approach or bet. As Hughes JP et al indicate in a 2011 article in the British Journal of Pharmacology, “Once a target has been chosen, the pharmaceutical industry and more recently some academic centres have streamlined a number of early processes to identify molecules which possess suitable characteristics to make acceptable drugs.”
Even with those, a billion dollars is a big bet.