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【drug-news】礼来默克辉瑞形成合资企业加快新药
July 10 (Bloomberg) -- Pfizer Inc., Merck & Co. and Eli Lilly & Co., along with a Boston-based venture capital firm, are pooling $39 million to start a research-based company aimed at speeding the discovery of new kinds of medicines.
The three drugmakers and the investment firm, PureTech Ventures LLC, formed Enlight Biosciences LLC, of Boston. H. Robert Horvitz, a Nobel Prize winner from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is the co-founder of Enlight.
Enlight will focus on an area of research often avoided by academics: the creation of new tools to better identify which drug candidates may succeed in human trials. The goal is to avoid failures late in drug development, such as Pfizer's cholesterol pill torcetrapib and Lilly's AIR insulin inhaler, both abandoned after side effects emerged in large human trials.
"There have been a lot of technologies rolled out in recent years, like genomics and high throughput screening, that have yet to have a major impact on success rates in drug development," said Les Funtleyder, an analyst with Miller Tabak & Co. in New York, in a telephone interview today. ``There's no magic bullet here, but it's a relatively modest investment to try something new and see if it pans out."
New York-based Pfizer, the world's biggest drugmaker, rose 17 cents to $18.20 at 9:31 a.m. in New York Stock Exchange composite trading. Merck, of Whitehouse Station, New Jersey, rose 37 cents, or 1 percent, to $37.43. Indianapolis-based Lilly rose 40 cents to $48.77.
Clinical Trials
As part of the joint venture, researchers will try to find ways to make sure drugs will succeed in clinical trials, develop tools to predict human responses, and come up with techniques, such as imaging and biomarkers, that provide accurate readouts of both animal and human response.
"This novel collaboration has the potential to provide Merck with a creative means to harness academic innovation as a means to improve the probability of success for our winners while ensuring that our unsuccessful candidates are identified earlier rather than later," said Mervyn Turner, a senior vice president at Merck, in an e-mailed statement today.
Companies in the partnership may use any technology or tests developed to refine experimental drugs in their own labs, said Daphne Zohar, the managing partner of PureTech, in an e-mail interview today. In addition, Enlight is "in active discussions with other pharmaceutical company members" and "may partner with other venture firms as programs develop and require additional funding."
Zohar declined to disclose financial terms of the partnership.
"Instead of working separately to attack the same problems such as productivity and drug failures, combining forces enables these companies to make a bigger dent and come up with creative solutions to help the industry broadly, as well as their own internal efforts,'' Zohar said. ``By reducing the failure rate they will also cut the ultimate cost of bringing innovative new medicines to patients."
To contact the reporter on this story: Robert Greene in Washington at rgreene2@bloomberg.net. 欢迎战友指正～
礼来默克辉瑞形成合资企业加快新药研发速度
By Lisa Rapaport
July 10 (Bloomberg) -- Pfizer Inc., Merck & Co. and Eli Lilly & Co., along with a Boston-based venture capital firm, are pooling $39 million to start a research-based company aimed at speeding the discovery of new kinds of medicines.
7月10日（彭博资讯）－辉瑞、默克和礼来与波士顿的一家风险投资基金公司一起融资3900万美元创建一家研发公司，旨在加快新药的开发速度。
The three drugmakers and the investment firm, PureTech Ventures LLC, formed Enlight Biosciences LLC, of Boston. H. Robert Horvitz, a Nobel Prize winner from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is the co-founder of Enlight.
三家制药公司与PureTech风险投资公司在波士顿共同成立了Enlight生物科学公司。一位来自马萨诸塞州理工学院的诺贝尔奖得主 H. Robert Horvitz为共同创办人。
Enlight will focus on an area of research often avoided by academics: the creation of new tools to better identify which drug candidates may succeed in human trials. The goal is to avoid failures late in drug development, such as Pfizer's cholesterol pill torcetrapib and Lilly's AIR insulin inhaler, both abandoned after side effects emerged in large human trials.
Enlight将集中在学术界通常会回避的一个研究领域，即开发新工具来更好的确认哪个药物可能在人体试验中成功。这样做的目的是为了避免新药研发后期出现失败，例如辉瑞的胆固醇药torcetrapib和礼来的吸入型胰岛素，都因在大规模人体试验中出现副作用而中止。
"There have been a lot of technologies rolled out in recent years, like genomics and high throughput screening, that have yet to have a major impact on success rates in drug development," said Les Funtleyder, an analyst with Miller Tabak & Co. in New York, in a telephone interview today. ``There's no magic bullet here, but it's a relatively modest investment to try something new and see if it pans out."
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作者:admin@医学,生命科学 2011-04-01 05:11
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