BIG pharma needs better ideas, and some industry bosses are betting that these will come from biomedical research centre Biopolis.
At United States-based Merck, the entire drug discovery process - from picking a molecule to develop a drug against to getting the drug tested on patients - usually takes more than 15 years.
It is also an expensive process, where 95 per cent of the drugs that get started ultimately fail.
"So, you could spend hundreds of millions of dollars on a clinical trial on tens of thousands of patients, and then the drug doesn't work. That is a huge cost," said Dr Robert Plenge, vice-president of Merck Research Laboratories in the US.
Dr Plenge believes the drugmaker can improve its odds by stepping outside its own in-house research unit and into the scientific community to pick better drug targets, guided by experts in the fields of cancer or diabetes, for example.
"Today, most of the really good ideas are going to come from outside the pharmaceutical industry," he said. "That is, they're going to occur in environments and ecosystems like here in Singapore. So we wanted to place ourselves into innovation hubs to work on projects together."
This form of "pre-competitive collaboration", as Dr Plenge calls it, took off just over a year ago out of Merck's research centre in Biopolis at one-north.
Through a joint steering committee with the Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*Star), Merck has been sifting for "fresh new ideas" from Singapore's academia.
Out of 100 proposals so far, the committee has chosen 15 that show promise in terms of potential drug discovery, and is now firming up the details of a working agreement for most of them.
It is early days yet, but "just doubling or tripling the success rate (for drug discovery) would save the industry hundreds of millions of dollars", said Dr Plenge.
Globally, drugmakers' spending on external research and development (R&D) collaborations is on the uptrend, and some of that investment has been coming to Singapore.
A glance at the headline numbers in the national survey of R&D may show that private sector spending on biomedical sciences R&D has been on the decline, but these numbers account only for the firms' in-house activity.
The fact is that drugmakers are spending more on external R&D collaborations and outsourcing, said A*Star industry development group director Jonathan Kua.
"We work with 30 leading pharma companies from around the world. Every year, the A*Star research institutes at Biopolis have about 30 new projects with these companies. Last year, we got over a dozen projects from one company alone," said Mr Kua.
"In some exploratory research projects, no money needs to change hands. However, some large projects can have $2 million to $4 million being contributed by the company. Some projects run for a year, some for three or four years."
Swiss drugmaker Novartis - one of the first to set up in Biopolis - started the Novartis Institute for Tropical Diseases (NITD) in 2002, and has since entered into several partnerships with local research institutes to find new medicines for infectious diseases.
A tie-up with A*Star to develop two malaria drugs has already moved on to Thailand for clinical trials.
Dr Thierry Diagana, who heads about 85 lab-based staff at NITD, said: "Biopharma is a risky business with a lot of attrition, but the results have been encouraging for now."
Another vote of confidence came this January from Japan's Chugai Pharmaceutical, which said it would keep expanding its research centre here until 2021.
Chugai Pharmabody Research (CPR) was established in Biopolis in 2012, with a focus on developing new therapeutic antibodies.
One way the Singapore lab measures its success is by the number of new antibody drug clinical candidates it sends to the home company for further development. Chugai could not disclose the exact number of projects that have been transferred, but said CPR's experiments are going smoothly.
The firm is in talks with A*Star about a possible collaboration.
"There are many chances to talk to the A*Star laboratories," said Dr Koichi Matsubara, chief executive of CPR, noting the ease with which industry, academia and the Government can enter into collaborations here.
While sceptics may dwell on British drugmaker GlaxoSmith- Kline's (GSK) impending exit from its neural pathways discovery performance unit at Biopolis announced last December, Mr Kua is unfazed.
"You'll see people come and go," he said.
Besides, the knowledge transfer between GSK and the local community will continue.
Mr Kua recalled a similar case in 2010, when American drugmaker Eli Lilly pulled the plug on its drug discovery centre in Biopolis.
Eli Lilly's was one of the first drug discovery teams in Singapore after Novartis', he said. After a change in leadership in its R&D arm, the firm cut 130 jobs.
"Many of our Singaporeans learnt drug discovery with (Eli Lilly), and some foreigners as well. Their shutting down caused these people to be spread out across the system," he added.
Today, the tall towers at Biopolis house a community of about 3,000 researchers, engineers and technical support staff, a third of whom are employed by the private sector. Pharmaceutical companies alone employ more than 300 researchers.
Medical technology firms, as well as nutrition and personal care brands such as Procter & Gamble, L'Oreal and Nestle, also operate research units in Biopolis.
This article was first published on Apr 4, 2015.
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