We asked Dr. Andrew Alexander Parsons, Director at Reciprocal Minds Limited and former VP Preclinical Drug Development and External Discovery at GSK in the UK, what really challenges the enhancement of early-stage development today. With his 15 years plus of experience working in collaborations and creating new frameworks for collaboration and investment between Pharma and Biotech, Parsons is the right person to ask. Read the full interview here: http://bit.ly/Slideshare_QA_Parsons

1. Expert Interview
Dr. Andrew Alexander Parsons, Director at Reciprocal Minds Limited and former VP
Preclinical Drug Development and External Discovery at GSK, UK will talk about “Crystallizing open innovation within the Stevenage biomedical catalyst” at this year’s 5th
Annual Discovery Partnerships Conference 2014 in Berlin, Germany. We won him for
an interview in advance where he discussed current and future burning issues of the
industry. Read the full interview here!
IQPC: What in your opinion are the major challenges today for enhancing early-stage development and what major trends can you recognize in
the MedChem partnership market?
Dr. Andrew A. Parsons: The increasing cost of medicines development with limited/no increase in the
number of approved medicines has produced the
well-known productivity gap. There have been a
number of hypotheses or explanations for the current state of the industry such as the “easy” targets
or low hanging fruit have been harvested, or the
complexity of clinical development and regulatory
expectations have made it less likely to succeed.
However, in my opinion the main challenge today
is very similar to the one 30 years ago. The Industry
as a whole still needs to develop cost–effective drug
discovery programs that provide safe and effective
medicines for patients and have value to society. It
almost seems the more we know about a disease
process, the greater
“...the main challenge today
the challenge. The
is very similar to the one 30
years ago. The Industry as a strong interplay between genes and
whole still needs to develop
cost–effective drug discovery environments is beprograms that provide safe and coming increasingly
effective medicines for patients clear and this reflects
and have value to society.”
the complexity of
targeting biological
processes with new effective and safe medicines.
This clarity and understanding of the technical risks
involved with developing early stage discovery programmes coupled with increasing cost has resulted
in a change in the way the industry operates. In the
past this has been a closed innovation model with
many activities conducted in house whereas today
external innovation is the default situation for many.
These external innovation partnerships may be service orientated or more collaborative and risk shar-
ing. They may have different types of organisations
involved in them. For example they could be between public and/or private partners. The Innovative
Medicines Initiative is a European Example of how
many partners can come together to manage the
complexities of a drug discovery process.
I also see a challenge in the way we educate and train
scientists in the areas of Discovery and Early Development Programmes. Having a technical capability
is still key, but now the development of processes
that work across organisations and the capability to
work collaboratively is an essential part of allowing
productive collaborations to flourish.
IQPC: Partnerships are far more important for
pharma companies today than they have ever
been before, in particularly co-operations between academia and industry. Why have industry-academia partnerships gained so much importance recently?
Dr. Andrew A. Parsons: Large Pharma companies
no longer have the funds to conduct all aspects of
R&D in abroad fashion. Choices are being made in
where core expertise really resides and the development of distributed R&D networks makes Financial
and Technical Sense from a risk perspective. As early stage programmes are likely to fail, have many to
choose from. Over the last few years it has become
really clear that Partnerships make sense. It allows
institutions / companies to focus on where they
really add value. Perhaps this is why Academic and
Industry partnerships are becoming increasingly
popular. It allows the public sector to develop new
ideas and challenge existing concepts which can be
commercialised effectively by the Industry. Academic collaborations have always been an essential part
of the life science industry. However, both the public
and private sectors are now looking for evidence of
www.discovery-partnerships.com