The stirrings of a revolution are starting to ripple through hundreds of laboratories. It’s a revolution that aims to result in new medicines – faster and with fewer failures – and it’s being led by three UK universities and three global pharmaceutical companies.
In January 2016, the tech transfer offices (TTOs) of Cambridge, Imperial College and UCL joined forces with three global pharmaceutical companies – AstraZeneca (AZ), GSK and Johnson & Johnson – to create a £40m collaboration called Apollo Therapeutics. Their aim is to streamline the academia-to-industry pipeline by “finding the best translatable science, funding it fast and running the right development programme to make it attractive to industry,” says CEO Dr Richard Butt.
Engagement and partnership are at the heart of the Apollo model. First, Butt’s team speaks to the academics and TTOs of the universities to identify exciting prospects, before taking some of the ideas to the wider team of investors. Once a project is selected for investment, Apollo and the academics work together to develop the discovery to a stage that will be attractive to a company to license and take further.
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