Earlier this week, AstraZeneca took the notion of research collaboration with universities in a new direction by handing over 22 compounds to academics by way of a wide-ranging agreement with the Medical Research Council, a publicly funded organization in the UK that supports medical research. The MRC will judge and select the best scientific proposals, and then award up to $15 million in total to fund research across different therapeutic areas. However, any projects that duplicate or overlap active development programs will not be eligible for MRC funding. And the patents on the compounds are still held by AstraZeneca, although the drugmaker plans to reach agreements to share revenues if actual medicines are developed. In doing so, AstraZeneca could recognize unexpected gain from compounds that were, essentially, mothballed without having to make additional investment. We spoke with Clive Morris, an AstraZeneca vp who heads new opportunities at iMed, the innovative medicines unit, about the deal This is an excerpt…

Pharmalot: So tell us about iMed..
Morris: Over last 12 to 18 months, as part of the overall R&D change, we created these units that are really an amalgam of previous discovery and early stage groups. We were challenged with taking the idea of taking targets all the way to the Phase 3 investment decision… and really establishing whatever program would have the legs to make it out…

As part of that, we set a number of different therapeutic groups – oncology, neuroscience, etc. – but there are also a whole range of diseases that don’t’ fall into individual groups… Given that focus, we really need to be sure we’re tossing the net across all diseases. But how do we do that with 5 or 10 units? That’s where the group that I lead was created. Our mission is how do we find new drugs for AstraZeneca in disease states that we haven’t traditionally researched? How do we broaden into new diseases?

Every one of the individual units has its own business plan and strategy.. They tend to be very different, but in some ways come together and look for ways to work across groups. The question was how can we do this in a way and not to create a big large internal machine? How do we act on finding the best external science and collaborations to drive our science?

Pharmalot: So how did you come to this latest arrangement?
Morris: There are two main planks for finding projects. There’s business development and licensing, which is bringing in external project s to AstraZeneca. The second plank is drug repositioning or repurposing. Which is how do we take our portfolio and find new uses for those products in new diseases where, historically, we might not have looked? That’s really the backdrop to this particular operation.

Pharmalot: Why the MRC?
Morris: As we looked at repositioning, we established a list of compounds for potential repositioning into new diseases. But what are the cost effective ways? Which academic institutions? We could talk to individual institutions, but wouldn’t be better to pass the net broadly? And so here’s a pool of assets to explore, but we don’t know which diseases or patients they may work in. With the MRC, we get a broad selection of proposals for diseases where we don’t have expertise. MRC has a strong drive around promoting translational research in the UK… They’ve bemoaned about the access to compounds from industry…

Pharmalot: A skeptic might say these compounds are cast offs, though. You know, compounds that are rejects with little real potential.
Morris: These molecules are all deprioritized… The are all compounds that we selected as potentially being repositionable… Their mechanisms (of action) may have some broader utility. But there’s no horrible flaw in the molecules. It’s not as if they’re not good for using at all… And we had already decided to look at drug repositioning and what broader utility they have. And the (arrangement with) the MRC came up as something when we were talking to them more broadly and then discussed more formally… The way drugs are failing in Phase 2 and the money and time spent, it speaks to degrees of benefit and risk.

The real challenge and real strength is to help us with by casting the net broadly… These are all things we clearly made some investment in, but somewhere along the way decided to deprioritize…They were tested and found a benefit wasn’t good enough or someone decided to get out of a disease or a mechanism in a therapy area… There were different reasons why some are deprioritized… But we’ve maintained the intellectual property on these… Again, the question for us became how would we look to repurpose these?

Pharmalot: And so this is more wide ranging in that any disease state can and should be pursued?
Morris: We purposely did not define a narrow disease scope. The call to academia is those guys know their field and hypotheses to explore…. Here are the tools to allow them to really probe the biology. We’re looking for novel exploration… We supply compounds and help academics test whichever disease model they’re interested in.. It’s very broad. I honestly have no idea which diseases will be going in…

Pharmalot: And how does the arrangement work?
Morris: We retain ownership of the compounds, all the original intellectual property. This might generate new IP. And if they did, the newer IP would be owned by the institutions and what we would have as part of the agreements covering a particular collaboration is some way to handle that IP and the right to negotiate exclusive licenses for market value…