Academic Commercialisation: The Third Way?

In an earlier post, Fail Fast Fail Early, focused on healthcare companies optimising their pipeline development, I asked whether there was a better way of commercialising medicines. Well GSK and Cambridge University have come with an interesting alternative development model using “academic incubators” to optimise the early clinical development of new medicines.

Cambridge will dedicate a team of academic experts to develop drugs with therapeutic potential, as well as bearing some financial risk for which they'd be compensated if the programme is a success. GSK will provide operational support, access to its in-house clinical research and imaging facilities, and background preclinical data on the drug. The agreement is fully aligned with one of the key recommendations of the Cooksey Review of UK Health Research Funding that consideration should be given to alternative drug development models, such as Public Private Partnerships, to optimise effective collaboration between industry and academic sectors in the development of effective new medicines.

Whether this is "ground-breaking approach" or just a sensible way of outsourcing development of low priority orphan drugs is open to debate. It does however establish a joined up pipeline from academic research towards commercialisation that may university inspired projects lack - despite their efforts to bolt on commercialisation activities. Also the fact that the projects are GSK sponsored gives a commercial focus to the activity from the outset that will undoubtedly benefit the eventual business outcomes. As we have seen with the Enterprise Fellowship projects backed by Yorkshire Forward, having some commercialisation DNA and focus at an early stage is invaluable.