Vicki Sato, professor of management practice, Harvard Business School

Tuesday, September 11, 2012

Its no surprise that a pervading theme at a conference Monday sponsored jointly by Pfizer Inc. and the Harvard Business School Health Industry Alumni Association was the growing trend toward partnerships between pharmaceutical companies and academia.

What was a surprise, however, was the time and attention focused on the limits of such partnerships at this weeks event, titled Innovation and Entrepreneurship in Drug Discovery and Development: Emerging Business Trends in Biomedicine. Conflict of interest issues in recent years - some of which have involved Harvard Medical School itself - were addressed by many of the speakers, including, notably, a talk by Jeffrey Flier, dean of Harvard Medical School.

But one speaker with the distinction of being on both sides of the equation - in academia as well as industry - was Vicki Sato, former president and chief scientific officer at Vertex Pharmaceuticals and vice president of research at Biogen Inc. who now serves as a professor at Harvard. She said that research partnerships between universities and pharmaceutical companies are needed more than ever as industry doesnt have the money to spend on discovery, and universities - which are short on funds themselves - are looking for corporate sponsors. Whether such partnerships have been a benefit to either side yet, she said, is yet to be seen.

The jury is still out, because weve yet to see sustained medical output from one of these partnerships, Sato said from the podium of the Joseph P. Martin Conference Center on the Harvard Medical School campus.

Sato said that strict conflict of interest rules have changed the dynamic between industry and academia. We no longer trade pens with Pfizer. We now trade lab notes, she said. But the fundamental differences in the end goal of each side - academia to do pure research, and pharmaceutical companies to make drugs - lead to inevitable tensions over the amount of secrecy needed, ownership of new discoveries, speed of research and mutual financial dependence, she said.

Sato sees a middle ground between pure and applied research for which she uses the term Pasteurs quadrant, taken from a 1997 book of the same name by Donald Stokes. She said that historically, drug companies have approached research from the standpoint of practical invention, in the style of Thomas Edison inventing the light bulb through trial and error. She used the term, Edisonian quadrant to describe a mode of research driven toward a specific end goal.

For many years, pharmaceutical science was very much in that quadrant... now were in a different place in how we think about drug discovery, she said. Namely, she said, in a kind of research which is aimed both at expanding the body of knowledge as well as finding new drugs. While such an approach may be new to both sides, and comes with its own tensions, she said the key will be getting young people involved, looking for the right problems to solve, and, of course, a big commitment of money.

The evolution of drug discovery is one of collaboration. Were discovering together, she said.

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Sato: Academic-pharma partnerships fraught with tension