December 15 2011

Last month, Dr. Stephen Friend held a talk for members of CRT and Cancer Research UK senior Management to update on the concept of Arch2POCM – a new approach to drug discovery and development.

For the uninitiated, Arch2POCM is a new Public Private Partnership (PPP) composed of academic, pharmaceutical industry and regulatory scientists and clinicians, public and private funders and patient groups. The goal of Arch2POCM PPP is to develop, use, and make available safe test compounds against novel protein targets to take oncology, immunology and neuroscience projects from ideas to Proof of Clinical Mechanism (POCM: Phase II clinical trials).

According to Dr. Friend and his colleagues at Sage BioNetworks, the current pharma model is broken with high costs, risk aversion, numerous failures and looming patent cliffs plaguing the industry.

• In 2010, the pharmaceutical industry spent  ~$100B for R&D
• Half of the 2010 R&D spend ($50B) covered pre-PH III activities
• Half of the pre-PH III costs ($25B) were for program targets that at least one other pharmaceutical company was actively pursuing
• Only 8% of pharma company small molecule PCCs make it to PH III
• In 2010, only 21 new medical entities were approved by FDA

With this in mind, Arch2POCM is a compelling pre-competitive model to generate more targets with clinical POC mechanism. The model intends to allow participants to:

• Eliminate redundant discovery and early development activities
• Leverage all information generated by the Arch2POCM to reduce the cost of failure
• Take advantage of validated POCM’s
• Obtain value for existing assets that are not currently getting developed.

The Arch2POCM concept is viewed by CRT as a very “interesting experiment” to improve the drug discovery and development process against an industry backdrop of spiralling costs and single-digit percentage success rates through oncology clinical development.

In essence the “IP-free” approach seeks to avoid the duplication of expensive mistakes by many companies by encouraging sharing of data.

The discovery of probe compounds is intended to minimise early expense and perceived delay caused through target validation studies.  In principle, the probe compound is generated to use in validation studies in cellular and in in vivo models, although the Arch2POCM initiative aims to generate probes of sufficient quality to take through to clinical POC.

CRT has participated in working group discussion to develop the concept of Arch2POCM and is currently considering, with Cancer Research UK, what role, if any, either or both organisation could or would play.

For more information about Arch2POCM, visit: http://sagebase.org/partners/Arch2POCM.php

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