A pact brokered by the U.S. National Institutes of Health will see a group of pharmaceutical companies and non-profit organizations co-operating in the race to find drugs to treat Alzheimer’s disease, Type 2 diabetes, rheumatoid arthritis and lupus.
The group, which includes 10 drugs companies, has agreed to share scientists, tissue and blood samples and data.
The aim is to decipher the biology behind the diseases by tracking down specific markers in the human genome. With Type 2 diabetes on the rise and a wave of Alzheimer's disease sufferers about to emerge in the baby boom generation, these conditions are set to overwhelm public health systems.
The $230-million U.S. project will make data and analyses publicly available in the biomedical community for the next five years.
As pharmaceutical firms get further into the process and actually find drugs that can target these biomarkers, they are likely to keep the knowledge close to the chest, one expert said.
But he called the partnership an important step, saying that many of the smaller firms and academics who work in the field will also benefit, as the knowledge will be publicly available.
Pharmaceutical firms usually jealously guard their research that identifies targets on the genome that could be used in diagnostics and new drug development.
But NIH director Francis Collins points out that drug development has become increasingly costly and has a very high failure rate.
"The good news is that recent dramatic advances in basic research are opening new windows of opportunity for therapeutics," he said in a news release.
Currently, developing a drug from early discovery through U.S. Food and Drug Administration approval takes well over a decade and costs about $1 billion U.S., with a failure rate of more than 95%, the NIH said.
The alliance involves global drugs firms such as Bristol-Myers Squibb, Johnson & Johnson, Lilly, Merck, BioGen and GlaxoSmithKline. The American Diabetes Association, the Lupus Foundation of America and the Alzheimer's Association have agreed to back the project and to help recruit patients for trials.
