Food for thought

Last week I attended the Genesis conference (http://www.genesisconference.co.uk) in London. It was an enjoyable event with some good presentations and the usual networking opportunities. The conference has become something of a showcase for the UK biotech scene and, given the current economic situation, the mood was surprisingly upbeat.

Reflecting back on the conference, one of the things that struck me was the domination of the agenda by drug discovery and, to a lesser extent, medical device technologies. Now this is nothing new but, as someone who has spent at least half of his career applying biotech to the food and agriculture sectors, I continue to be both amazed and disappointed by the lack of attention paid by the UK biotech community to matters gastronomic. No doubt our French friends would have something to say on this subject but it seems to me that, in the UK biotech, is synonymous with healthcare and medtech.

Now, there is no doubting the importance for society of addressing healthcare issues and the potential financial rewards for the developers of new products in this sector. However, has no one in the UK biotech community heard about the looming issue of food security, which promises to be just as much of a global threat as any pandemic?

Take the drought that devastated the Australian wheat harvest last year; wheat prices across the globe soared by 130%, while shopping bills in Britain leapt by 15%. This was a mere foretaste of what is likely to come. Over the next 40 years Britain's population will rise from 60 to 75 million while the world's will leap from 6.8 to 9 billion. Feeding all these people will stretch human ingenuity to its limit.

Professor Mike Bevan of the John Innes Centre in Norwich has said "We are going to have to produce as much food in the next 50 years as was produced over the past 5,000 years. Nothing less will do." Because of climate change, the farmers of tomorrow will not only have to improve yields using less fertiliser and less water, they will also have to be increasingly wary of new agricultural pests and diseases as global temperatures rise and more and more devastating varieties of plant viruses and fungal pathogens spread around the globe. You can find more information on these issues at www.foodsecurity.ac.uk.

Europe has been something of a no go area for biotech crops over the last decade but the rest of the world has moved on with 125 million hectares of biotech crops planted in 2008. There is now an urgent need to develop novel ways of growing food crops with fewer chemicals, in more hostile environments and with potentially severe water restrictions. This is a challenge that the UK, and the rest of Europe, cannot afford to ignore; we must start to channel some of the ingenuity previously applied to, for example, the development of therapeutic antibodies, towards the production of crops and agricultural systems that can cope with all that climate change will bring to our farming communities.

New approaches to stimulating the productivity of pharmaceutical R&D

I’m sure we all remember the excitement generated by the sequencing of the human genome in the late 1990’s culminating in publication of the essentially complete genome in April 2003. This was accompanied by a lot of hype about the impact on pharmaceutical R&D productivity and a concomitant surge in investment into the sector.

Looking back as the end of the decade draws near it is clear that the much anticipated impact on pharmaceutical R&D has not materialised. The rates of new product approvals has declined whilst investment in R&D has continued to climb; a recent analysis of the Pharmaprojects database revealed that between 2000 and 2008, 1,941 drugs in development were discontinued (Biancardi, A. & Green, S. Scrip 100, S33–S36, 2008).

One of the principal factors contributing to the problem is the complexity of the biology underlying specific diseases. This, coupled with the recent explosion in large-scale biological data, is leading to a realisation that no individual organization has the resources to maximize the potential of molecular data to inform drug development.

It is interesting to observe the emergence of novel models for pre-competitive collaboration to help tackle the challenges of innovative drug development (see Hughes, B. Nature Reviews Drug Discovery 8, 344-345, 2009). Some of these models seek to leverage information in an open-access way (freely available with no intellectual property (IP) restrictions). Examples include:
· Sage (http://sagebase.org): using data from Merck and seed funding from private sources
· Two initiatives created and spun out by Lilly: InnoCentive (http://www.innocentive.com) and Collaborative Drug Discovery (http://www.collaborativedrug.com), harnessing the collective talent accessible through the Internet
Several other drug development challenges, such as biomarker identification and validation, are increasingly being addressed at a pre-competitive level, often through public–private partnerships. Examples include:
· The Biomarkers Consortium (http://www.biomarkersconsortium.org)
· Critical Path Institute consortia (http://www.c-path.org/consortia.cfm)
· The Innovative Medicines Initiative (http://imi.europa.eu/index_en.html)

The issue of who owns the IP arising from these partnerships has provoked much debate. The research tools that emerge from the IMI will be made available to other companies and academic groups for research purposes at a reasonable cost or free of charge, although the IP rights will belong to members of each consortium.

I am Chairman of Psynova Neurotech (www.psynova.com), which is a participant in one of the first projects funded by the Innovative Medicines Initiative. The project is just getting off the ground but our experience to date suggests that public–private partnerships have much to offer the pharmaceutical industry. A more flexible attitude to the creation and exploitation of IP appears to be the order of the day.