In a world in which the probability of clinical success is just 10%-20% for new medicines, pharmaceutical multinationals increasingly turn to academia and biotech as a source of “de-risked” technology for their pipelines. This exchange of ideas, equity and capital depends on firm relationships between entities having apparently divergent interests: from not-for-profit research to international commerce.
As a former pharma contract negotiator, I spent much of my past life attempting to find common ground with university researchers and biotech leadership teams. In 2021, I had the privilege of returning to academia in the UK after a prolonged hiatus, and – more recently – of working with start-ups. In this blog, I will comment on some of the surprising trends I have observed in how pharma, biotech and academics balance the conduct of meaningful research with the requirements of their respective sectors. The views herein are entirely my own.
Pharmaceutical companies have two fundamental obligations: i) to make drugs or vaccines that improve the quality and/or span of human life, and ii) to return profits to their shareholders. These twin engines can, but (famously) do not always pull in the same direction. Whilst there is considerable and understandable public scepticism about the motives of pharmaceutical company employees, most that I have met are more driven by the opportunity to do societal good, or to work on exciting science, than by generating shareholder returns.
The need to focus on patient benefit is not only a compelling reason to get up in the morning but, critically, orients drug research towards the end user – be it oral vaccines for infants, or longer-acting medications to reduce pill burden for those living with HIV. The same is true for biotechnology companies, but with an important shift in emphasis: new technologies should not only address a compelling unmet need (read, a patient population whose requirements are not adequately met by the best available treatments), but proof-of-concept should be demonstrable with constrained capital.
To put this in context, the average cost of new drug development is well over a billion USD, and start-up biotechnology firms typically raise of order $5m-$10m in seed funding (ignoring a few recent tech-enabled outliers). Thus, start-up bio-founders must trade off the need to find the best experiments, which will pique investor and/or pharma interest, with a looming cash-out date. These choices have become increasingly difficult as the sophistication of modern medicine blossoms, and as competition stiffens for early-stage funding. Whilst pharma multinationals are certainly mindful of capital efficiency in R&D, the pressure is notably less acute in the day-to-day.
Turning to academia, a focus on the patient is, perhaps unsurprisingly, stronger in clinical researchers (i.e. MD PhD’s) than in fundamental biomedical research. More common (in my limited and biased experience) is an obsession with finding creative solutions to challenging problems in a given field. To borrow examples from computational immunology – this is an OPIG blog after all – these can range from the search for a solution to generalisable TCR specificity inference, to modelling hypervariable loop structures with limited data, to prediction of antibody developability. These examples highlight an important nuance: whilst the focus may be on the computational or immunological problem, the translational potential is enormous – ranging from the creation of safer TCR therapeutics, to understanding the fundamental rules of antigen recognition, to the efficient design of new antibody-based biologics.
The extent to which patients feature in everyday conversation will vary from group to group, and from funder to funder. It must be said however that researchers make considerable sacrifices to pursue their favourite problem. Fully-funded UK PhD students can expect annual stipends of under £20k, and competition for post-doctoral positions is staggering. Without these sacrifices, many of the ideas at the broad end of the innovation funnel would fail to manifest, and with them the opportunities for alleviating global suffering.
Each of the three sectors must therefore balance the need to innovate with the cost of research, from proof of concept in the lab to complex and global clinical trials. If there is one thing that I would take away from my time in pharma, academia, and biotech, it is a uniting passion for science and the desire to make a difference. Long may it reign.
