Coming full circle
Anthony del Campo helps find commercial opportunities for discoveries by Dana-Farber faculty and staff.
Dana-Farber is addressing these needs with an array of initiatives. The aim is not only to speed drug development, but also to improve the chances that potential drugs will succeed during testing and be tailored to patients' individual conditions. To some extent, it involves bringing more drug-development functions in-house, giving Dana-Farber investigators and their colleagues greater control over the process and greater autonomy over the direction of research. It also means dissolving some of the barriers that have traditionally separated academia and industry, opening new opportunities for collaboration.
In the commercial realm, Anthony del Campo, vice president for Research and Technology Ventures, has enhanced business-development activity by building a portfolio of research and licensing agreements with the biopharmaceutical industry (see Licensing innovation).
In drug design, Dana-Farber has launched a program in chemical biology, in which scientists fabricate compounds that can be used to study cell processes or become the basis of new therapies (see Joining forces to target more tumors).
Clinical research, too, is intensifying with the creation of two centers. The Center for Developmental Therapeutics, directed by George Demetri, MD, is intended to be a magnet for drug testing by pharmaceutical companies and a resource to clinical investigators at the Institute, according to Kantoff. The Early Drug Development Center, led by Acting Director Geoff Shapiro, MD, PhD, focuses on phase I safety trials, as well as "proof-of-concept" trials that occur before phase II testing of their effectiveness.
"As part of the Institute's Strategic Plan, we've established a variety of centers and shared laboratory facilities over the past several years in the areas of cell manipulation, tumor imaging, and cancer pharmacology, among others," Kantoff says. "These have given us, for the first time, the ability to 'complete the circle' – to discover potential drug targets, identify or make compounds that attack them, and test them in the lab, in animal models, and finally in patients.
"We're designing a coordinated system to bring these resources together," he adds. "It will be a 'virtual' organization, called the Clinical Research Institute (CRI), that gives clinical investigators access to the technical and scientific expertise at Dana-Farber. The goal is to build an Institute-wide, user-friendly system for advancing work on new therapies." Kantoff expects a preliminary plan for the CRI to be completed this summer.
Still another step came this past winter, when Dana-Farber's Center for Applied Cancer Science (CACS) entered an alliance with the pharmaceutical firm Merck and Co. that bridges the traditional divide between academia and industry. The aim is to develop therapies that, unlike the vast majority of fresh-from-the-lab cancer drugs, actually succeed in clinical trials.
"Historically, there is a 95 percent failure rate in cancer drug development," says Ronald DePinho, MD, of the CACS. "Drugs that pass safety testing in phase I trials too often fail to show efficacy in later-stage trials, or prove effective in only a small subset of patients."
One reason for this poor showing is the contractual "iron curtain" preventing academic scientists and pharmaceutical engineers from collaborating once a drug target has been licensed. Like Dana-Farber's longstanding agreement with Novartis, this alliance allows CACS and Merck researchers to bounce ideas off one another and bring their own expertise to bear on problems. The new agreement "represents an important advance toward true team science between Dana-Farber and one of the world's leading pharmaceutical companies," notes Dana-Farber's Lynda Chin, MD, the senior investigator of the new alliance.
"The capabilities within this institution and its research partners are virtually unrivaled," Kantoff says. "All the pieces of a full-spectrum drug-development program are here. It's time to unite them."
