The Burrill Report


Sanford-Burnham Medical Research Institute said it has entered into a collaboration with a Johnson & Johnson subsidiary to discover compounds for Alzheimer’s disease and major psychiatric disorders.

Ortho-McNeil-Janssen Pharmaceuticals will collaborate with the independent research institute to identify and validate new targets for drug discovery and identify compounds suitable for lead optimization and further development by Ortho.

Under the agreement, Ortho gets exclusive access for three years to a team of world-class scientists and a translational infrastructure dedicated to finding new approaches to treating patients with neurological and psychiatric conditions. For Sanford-Burnham, the collaboration will advance its efforts to expand its translational research. The institute will also receive funding including: upfront and yearly access fees, funding of discovery research in the field, milestone payments and royalties for successfully developed products.

“This represents the first of what we expect to be a series of thematic collaborations that focus our tremendous scientific and translational firepower on major unmet medical problems,” says John Reed, CEO of Sanford-Burnham. “Working in concert with strong partners, we can bridge the gap between early- and late-stage drug development.”

At a time when financial pressures are forcing Big Pharma to pull back from investing in early-stage research and financial constraints on biotechs are forcing more conservative approaches, Sanford Burnham points to the critical role independent research institutes can play. Backed with funding from federal grants, philanthropy, and the pharmaceutical industry, such institutes can perform the discovery and translational work that has simply grown too risk for industry.

In the last three years Burnham has invested about $50 million in screening equipment to build a compound library that rivals the compound library of a large pharmaceutical. Its Center for Chemical Genomics has about 80 people from biotech and pharma who work side-by-side with principal investigators from Sanford Burnham to identify new drug targets and new pathways for diseases, and develop the assays and reagents needed to explore them. It has the ability to use induced pluripotent stem cells from patients with diseases and examine them with high throughput microscopy screening.

In September 2009, the institute named Michael Jackson, the former Senior Vice President of Drug Discovery at J&J Pharmaceutical Research and Development, vice president of drug discovery where he is leading a transformation of the center into a drug discovery and translational medicine powerhouse that seeks to partner with pharmaceutical companies.

“This agreement sets the stage for Sanford-Burnham to fully leverage the drug discovery infrastructure the institute has put into place over the last five years,” says Jackson.

As pharmaceutical companies look for new models for drug discovery it is likely that universities and independent research institutes will increasingly play a greater role in translating discoveries in the lab to actual product candidates that can be advanced to the clinic. For pharmaceutical companies it’s a way to reduce its R&D risk and spread its bets, while for institutes such as Sanford-Burnham, it provides greater assurance that investment in basic science results in a real return for society and the economy.



January 20, 2011
http://www.burrillreport.com/article-sanford_burnham_pushes_new_role_in_jj_collaboration.html