The ‘claim to fame’ in translation research

It is common knowledge across the biotech ecosystem – ranging from universities to pharma companies – that biomedical research from academia has been and will continue to be one of the most relevant sources of innovative future medicines. Is this premise really true?

While tangible statistics are surprisingly difficult to find, it has been previously reported that 13% of New Molecular Entities (NMEs) approved by the FDA from 1990 to 2007 originated from public- sector research institutions (Stevens et al., 2011). More recent publications show that academic inventors have contributed to a third or more of FDA- approved medicines since 2017 (Nayak et al., 2019; Kinch et al., 2020; Simoens & Hueys, 2022). On the other hand, it is well-documented that the relative impact of academia on drug development declines swiftly over the later-stage preclinical and clinical phases and a report concluded that between 1991 and 2010, there was not a single regulatory approval without industry collaboration (Takebe et al., 2018).

These data imply that academic and industrial researchers must collaborate in translational drug discovery if they want to develop novel medicines more effectively.

The modus operandi of academic researchers collaborating with industry partners to enable and advance drug discovery is multi-faceted and the subject of this mini-series of White Papers. It builds on the view that the global academic community is an unparalleled reservoir for drug discovery concepts, as appreciated by many industry leaders (Bergauer et al., 2016). Yet systematic probing of its full potential to accelerate the development of novel therapeutics at a global scale has been hampered by multiple confounding factors ranging from ‘cultural’ to ‘commercial’. Here, we aim to shed light on novel solutions for collaboration models that help to facilitate and accelerate the translation from academic idea to commercial reality in practice.

To continue reading, download the full whitepaper below.