Healthy Skepticism Library item: 17862

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Publication type: Electronic Source

Herper M
Is Secrecy Hurting Drug Research?
The Science Business (Forbes Blog) 2010 Jun 1
http://blogs.forbes.com/sciencebiz/2010/06/is-secrecy-hurting-drug-research/

Full text:

The big question in the drug industry is why nobody seems to be able to invent any new drugs. Big Pharma is going to lose billions of dollars to patent expirations over the next five years, but fewer products are emerging from drug company labs, and those that reach the market are not selling as well as they used to. What has gone wrong?

One surprising answer: It may be that companies’ tendency to keep their research under wraps is holding them back. Secrecy leads companies to race down the same blind alleys, to miss opportunities and to understand biology less than they otherwise might.

Now former executives from companies including Merck and Genentech are pushing to open up many stages of drug development, from basic science to human research, in the hopes of ending this drought.

At Sage Bionetworks in Seattle, former Merck vice-president Stephen Friend is trying to pool data from drug companies and academics to create predictive models of the body’s chemistry. Merck has signed up for one project, and Pfizer for another, with both of them providing data to the effort. Two years after the collaborations begin, the companies will make their data available through Sage’s database. The idea is that sharing data in this way will lead to a better understanding of biology, and to better drugs.

Friend says that companies will continue to keep their individual drug compounds secret, because they can still invent medicines faster than their rivals. But in biological research, he argues, there is increasing evidence of “the absurdity of how data is not shared.” He adds: “It’s not just industry, it’s academia. If patients ever came to an understanding of how people do not share data in academia, they would revolt.”

GlaxoSmithKline is opening up its libraries of chemical compounds to fight malaria. It is allowing outside researchers access to its technology, intellectual property and chemical libraries in the hopes of creating anti-malarial drugs. If a use were to turn up outside malaria, Glaxo would keep the rights.

In cancer, drugs may increasingly have to be studied in tandem, or in combination. M.D. Anderson Cancer Center looked at four different lung cancer drugs being developed by separate companies: AstraZeneca, Roche, Onyx Pharmaceuticals and Eisai. The idea was to use blood tests to try and predict which patients would respond to which drug. Early results were promising. Until now, it was unusual for so many yet to be marketed medicines to be tested together in one study.

A similar effort is occurring at the University of California, San Francisco, where researchers are studying four different experimental drugs in a study of 800 women. They are using specially designed blood tests to try and pick the right drug for the right patient and prevent bad decisions.

“All companies today are concerned with the sustainability with the way we’ve done research and development over the years. We hear it everywhere,” says Susan Desmond-Hellmann, a former Genentech executive who is now UCSF’s chancellor. “The question is can you give up the secret nature that is your competitive advantage because you gain so much participating in a process like this?”

It’s possible that a more open-source approach could have averted some of the drug industry’s biggest controversies. Take the diabetes drug Avandia, from GlaxoSmithKline, which critics say is linked to an increased rate of heart attacks. In the first half of this decade, drugs like Avandia that worked by triggering cellular master switches called peroxisome proliferator-activated receptors (PPARs) were a hot area. The hope was that these pills could lower both blood sugar and cholesterol.

Companies started tests of 50 drugs targeted at the PPARs between 2000 and 2006, but not one of these medicines made it to the market. They seemed to cause side effects, including heart and liver risks, with some regularity. Pooling the results of all those studies as they were conducted might have led drug companies to use their money more wisely. It might also have shed more light on whether there is a problem with Avandia. Traditionally, drug companies don’t share data with each other as studies progress. Increasingly, it seems that might be a mistake.