AstraZeneca, the second largest pharmaceuticals group in Britain, had inked an agreement with the Medical Research Council or MRC, a group funded by the state, which will have the latter's academic scientists working together with the drugmaker's staff in its new location in Cambridge, Reuters reported.
Cambridge will be the new home of AstraZeneca in 2016. The move to transfer the drug manufacturer in the university city is part of Chief Executive Officer Pascal Soriot's $2.5 billion plan to revamp the company. Soriot is counting on closer ties with schools to come up with ideas that will help AstraZeneca's efforts to resurrect research on new drugs, the report said.
AstraZeneca has not come up with a new drug in the past few years. It's critical for the company to discover new medicines as patent protection for its best-selling medicines like Nexium and Crestor, medicines for heartburn and high cholesterol, respectively, is set to be lost in the next few years, the report said.
The collaboration, which is initially set for five years, could help AstraZeneca get early leads for new medicines. The academics will be able to access over 2 million compounds in the library of AstraZeneca as well as be able to use the drugmaker's sophisticated screening equipment to study ailments and their potential therapies. MRC will then evaluate their research proposals and will then finance as many as 15 projects annually. AstraZeneca will get the first option to license any therapy that would come out from the drug discovery programs, the report said.
AstraZeneca Head of Discovery Sciences Mike Snowden considered the partnership a flagship deal but added that they would still forge other alliances with other academics from their new headquarters, the report said.
The report quoted Snowden as saying, "The strategy is to share science. Cambridge is a hotspot for bioscience. That's why we're moving there and it certainly makes it easier to work with people like the MRC, who have their Laboratory of Molecular Biology next to where we work."
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