Pfizer’s University Collaboration Program Seeks to Foster Early-Stage Academic Research
The long view on academic-industrial partnering trends reveals a cultural shift in the direction of openness and cooperation for both academic research institutes and the pharmaceutical industry.
In this same direction, Pfizer has now announced the creation of the Innovative Target Exploration Network (ITEN), a new, early-stage partnering model that enables collaborative relationships with select academic institutions and principal investigators around the world, to identify research projects that have the potential to deliver novel therapeutic targets and mechanisms of action to underpin future drug discovery in core areas of interest to Pfizer.
The ITEN program involves the appointment of a lead Pfizer person who acts as the point of contact with scientists at each institution, and the first fruits of those negotiations have already been harvested.
Established in 2017, the first ITEN partnerships with Cambridge, Oxford and UTSW have each already generated research projects that have been identified. The Cambridge and Oxford University research projects each will focus on deubiquitinylation enzymes (DUBs), a gene family previously considered challenging to target, that might aid in potentially treating cancer as well as autoimmune, cardio-metabolic diseases and rare diseases.
The ITEN model further
demonstrates Pfizer’s ongoing commitment to partnering with academia to foster the creation of the next generation of breakthrough medicines. By starting the discovery process before a preclinical candidate is identified, the ITEN model will complement the successful work of Pfizer’s Centers for Therapeutic Innovation (CTI), a pioneering collaboration model that was launched by Pfizer in 2010 to forge academic-foundation-industry collaborations and to bridge the gap between early scientific discovery and its translation into clinical candidates.With 25 academic institutions and six foundations in its network, as well as the National Institutes of Health, CTI has successfully brought multiple projects to the clinic across a diversity of disease areas.
“By establishing relationships with researchers early in the research and development process, we believe the ITEN model will better position us to identify potentially promising research projects,” commented Pfizer’s chief scientific officer Uwe Schoenbeck.
“The ITEN partnering model creates an environment of creative and agile scientific interaction” will sit alongside Pfizer’s Centers for Therapeutic Innovation partnering scheme, which has been running since 2010,” he added.
