New Consortium to Aid Academic Drug Development

Four leading US academic research centers are joining forces with an independent research institute to accelerate the translation of new drugs from discovery into clinical use. The consortium is called PharmaStart.

Members of the consortium are Stanford University (Palo Alto, CA, USA), three branches of the University of California (San Diego, San Francisco, and the San Francisco campus of the California Institute for Quantitative Biomedical Research), and SRI International (Menlo Park, CA, USA), a research institute. Through PharmaStart, investigators at member organizations have access to SRI's consulting and pre-clinical development services. These include technical and regulatory planning, contract research, manufacturing, networking, and resources to help bring a drug candidate to clinical use.

Pharmaceutical companies and venture capitalists have become more conservative in recent years, restricting their involvement to strong drug candidates with high potential. As a result, many new drug candidates, particularly for the treatment of rare diseases that do not represent a large market, are not attracting interest and are not being developed.

"Universities are not equipped to perform the necessary Food and Drug Administration (FDA)-compliant development tasks required to start clinical trials,” said Glenn Rice, vice president of SRI's Biosciences Division. "Thus, breakthrough drugs fail to reach the clinic and the marketplace where society benefits. We expect that PharmaStart will catalyze the emergence of new collaborations, new drug development initiatives, and new funding sources.”





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