Professor Tony Kouzarides is passionate about ecosystems: well-balanced communities that flourish on mutual and dynamic interactions. But the ecosystems that excite him are not made up of plants, animals and environments. They’re made up of experts.
Kouzarides is the founding Director of the Milner Therapeutics Institute, which is due to open in 2018 on the Cambridge Biomedical Campus. The ecosystem he sees thriving within its walls is one in which academic researchers (“experts in the biology of diseases”) work closely with pharmaceutical companies (“who know what’s needed to get the drug to clinic”) to find new medicines. Put simply, he says, the Institute will be “a pipeline for drug discovery within an academic setting.”
While the labs are being fitted out with robotics for customised drug screening, gene-editing facilities to rewrite DNA and bioinformatics support to help scientists deal with huge datasets, the partnerships between industry and academia are already under way.
In June 2015, a research agreement was signed between the University of Cambridge, the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute and the Babraham Institute with three pharmaceutical companies – AstraZeneca (AZ), Astex and GSK. Since then, Pfizer, Shionogi and Elysium Pharmaceuticals have joined the Milner Therapeutics Consortium, the outreach programme of the Institute.
With this one agreement, doors opened. Dr Kathryn Chapman, Executive Manager of the Milner Therapeutics Institute, explains: “Forming the Consortium means there’s now a free exchange of potential drug molecules between pharma and academia. This sounds straightforward but, before the agreement, this could take a year because of confidentiality and material transfer contracts. Now it takes two to three weeks. It lowers barriers of engagement, it speeds up research and it can involve hundreds of molecules in one go.”
From 2018, the Consortium will form a major part of the Milner Therapeutics Institute, which has been made possible through a £5m donation from Dr Jonathan Milner, a former member of Kouzarides’ research group and entrepreneur.
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