CASE STUDIES

Collaboration

MRC Unit Director Sir Philip Cohen in Dundee has been studying Protein Phosphorylation for 35 years, during which it has emerged as one of the body’s principal control mechanisms. Abnormalities in Protein Phosphorylation have been shown to be a cause of global diseases, such as cancer, diabetes and rheumatoid arthritis and it is now one of the largest areas of scientific research worldwide. His team has a history of successful cooperation with industry, notably its relationship with U.S. company Upstate, which led to the setting up of Upstate Dundee – a company with 65 employees.

In 1996, Cohen and his colleague Peter Downes began to seek support from the pharmaceutical industry for a Division of Signal Transduction Therapy (DSTT) to help speed up the development of specific inhibitors of kinases and phosphatases.

The DSTT eventually started in July 1998 with five year support of £6.5 million from Astra, Zeneca, Pfizer, SmithKline Beecham and NovoNordisk – later joined by Boehringer Ingelheim. This unique collaboration proved so successful that it was renewed for a further five years in 2003 at a greatly expanded level (this time supported by AstraZeneca, Boehringer Ingelheim, GlaxoSmithKline, Merck and Co, Merck KGaA and Pfizer). With core funding of £15.2 million plus add-ons, it is one of the largest research collaborations between the pharmaceutical industry and a UK Research Institution. At BIO99, Pfizer described the DSTT as their most important academic collaboration worldwide, while GlaxoSmith Kline have stated that it is the model for how Industrial-Academic collaborations should work.

Licensing

In 1986 MRC filed a patent application to protect the ground breaking technology of ‘antibody humanization’, invented by Greg Winter at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge. Subsequently, a number of additional patent applications were filed. To date, licences to perform humanization have been granted to around 50 companies world wide. This has resulted in an avalanche of humanized antibody products in development. Ten of the nineteen therapeutic antibody products currently on the market are humanized by the Winter approach, including Avastin®, Synagis®, and Tysabri® providing successful treatments for diseases such as cancer, infectious diseases and multiple sclerosis. The predicted size of the therapeutic antibody market is projected to more than double to US$30 billion by 2010.

Further Case Studies

The MRC website has further case studies - please click here to visit the Stories of Discovery pages