The new model for translational research
The exciting new Translational Drug Discovery Group at Sussex is using the wealth of basic biology research and clinical experience that exists at the University to develop a novel, cross-disciplinary model for drug discovery that they hope will generate new drugs for difficult-to-treat disease areas such as cancer and neurodegeneration.
Drug development
Despite a long history of excellence and innovation in the discovery, clinical development and bringing to market of new drugs, the traditional pharmaceutical industry model for new drug development in the UK has been significantly eroded over the last 20 years and is now under serious threat.
Escalating research and development costs, combined with the sales of new drugs failing to replace the income lost as many 'blockbuster' drugs go off patent, has undermined the sustainability of the drug discovery pipeline.
The low success rates of drugs making it through development to reach the market (and, therefore, high levels of unrecovered costs) has led to the closure of many of the UK's major corporate research sites, including those of Pfizer, Merck, Roche, GlaxoSmithKline, and AstraZeneca, with the consequent termination of research into many important disease areas.
Nevertheless, there remains a large unmet medical need for many diseases, particularly those associated with an ageing population.
Bridging the gap
To redress this, different approaches to drug discovery are required to change the paradigm for translational research in this country.
The University of Sussex has taken a collaborative approach to establish the Translational Drug Discovery Group, which aims to combine industrial experience with academic excellence to develop novel treatment approaches in such difficult-to-treat disease areas as cancer and neurodegeneration.
The Group employs ex-pharmaceutical industry experts in drug development, including Simon Ward, Professor of Medicinal Chemistry, and John Atack, Professor of Molecular Pharmacology, both of whom have an extensive track record of leading drug-discovery teams from initial idea through to clinical trials.
The primary goal of this new industry experienced group is to bridge the gap between fundamental biological research within the Schools of Life Sciences and Psychology and the Genome Damage and Stability Centre, and the clinical expertise within the Brighton and Sussex Medical School and the Brighton and Sussex University Hospitals NHS Trust.
In doing so, the intention is to translate scientific and clinical expertise into drug-discovery efforts aimed at identifying novel therapeutic targets that will result in the development of new drugs to address unmet clinical needs.
As our fundamental knowledge of biological systems grows, the potential exists to create more sophisticated targeted therapies and to identify selectively the patient groups that will benefit from them.
This moves further away from the traditional pharmaceutical industry approach of finding blockbuster drugs that can be administered to a broad spectrum of patients (the one size fits all approach) that, while maximising financial gain, does not necessarily deliver optimal efficacy and tolerability to all patients.
Designing more disease-specific targeted therapies may be suitable for smaller patient subpopulations, and also has the potential to deliver stronger clinical effects.
The knowledge required to develop such tailor-made, personalised medicines is now far more likely to come from an academic research environment than from industry giants.
Seeking to understand the disease process
The Translational Drug Discovery Group aims to work with the depth of scientific knowledge that already exists at Sussex, specifically in the areas of cancer research and neuroscience.
Within that context, the Group's industry knowledge and the setting up of a drug-design laboratory in the Department of Chemistry provides the capability to take research forward from a basic science level, to identify new molecules and provide preliminary data to support their potential as therapeutic agents.
The Group does not intend to reproduce the big drug company methods of drug discovery. Rather, in collaboration with their colleagues within the University, they will apply new and emerging technologies and information to better understand the disease process as well as the drug targets themselves.
Without the infrastructure of a drug company, they will be looking to sustain and expand the group by identifying external partnerships in the form of grants from bodies such as the Wellcome Trust, venture capital, or drug-company investments.
This will generate the capital to take the development of promising agents forward to the clinical trial stage and help recoup the University's initial start-up funding.
While the relationship between academia and drug development is not new (there have been many spin-off biotech companies set up to develop one-off discoveries), this project represents a new approach in terms of having the foresight to bring together industry and academic preclinical and clinical expertise with a view to designing and developing new treatment strategies.
There is little doubt that the traditional pharmaceutical drug-discovery process requires a paradigm shift, and so there is optimism that the approach being pursued by the Translational Drug Discovery Group represents a novel business model and may be at the forefront of a new phase in the world-leading British drug-discovery industry.
This project has been supported by Cancer Research UK.
Richard's perspective
Dr Richard Angell,Research fellow, Department of Chemistry, said: "Before recently returning to academia to join the Translational Drug Discovery Group, I'd spent 20 years at big pharmaceutical and biotech companies.
"I'd been part of a research team that discovered lapatinib (a small-molecule treatment for breast cancer) and had put several new treatments for viral infection into clinical trials.
"Working in the Translational Drug Discovery Group is tremendously enjoyable. I've learnt a lot of new science, working closely with the principal investigators in the Genome Centre who are both welcoming and open to working collaboratively.
"I've never worked so close to the fundamental science and am enjoying the opportunities to be in at the start of some very exciting drug-discovery projects.
"The next few years will be key for us as we look to identify new molecules that will interfere with the biological processes we are targeting."