A Wellcome experiment in seeding drug discovery

Abstract

When the Wellcome Trust launched its 5-year Seeding Drug Discovery Initiative (SDDI) in October 2005 they set out to facilitate the development of drug-like small molecules that address unmet medical needs. “We consider projects in all disease areas, from any originating environment,” says Richard Davis, the business development manager at the Trust, who is responsible for the day-to-day management of the SDDI based in London, UK. “A project could be from an academic institution, a spin-out company or even an established pharmaceutical company because we ultimately base the decision [to grant an award] on the excellence of the science.” Four years into the initiative, the Trust’s Board of Governors is considering the programme’s future. Those that have been fortunate enough to receive an award obviously hope that the initiative will continue. “The SDDI is a good complement to RD 2007). “We approached Wellcome to accelerate our internal programmes because the challenges are so tough that we need larger chemistry and biology teams to increase our probability of success,” Payne explains. Funding commitments Since its inception, the SDDI has committed £80.4 million to 30 awards (in 19 academic institutions and 11 companies) covering a wide range of therapeutic areas. With the exception of GSK, the companies receiving SDDI awards are spin-out or small biotech companies navigating the currently particularly challenging capital-raising environment. It is essential therefore that the SDDI aims for “projects to progress to a stage whereby there is sufficient evidence to make the project results, intellectual property and outcomes attractive to follow-on developers or investors who may be from the commercial or not-for-profit sectors.” This goal also appeals to the self-selecting academics that want to do this research, says Davis. “They really have a drive to understand this process and to ultimately develop compounds that can be taken into the clinic.” One such researcher is Professor Steve Bloom at Imperial College, London, UK, who received an award to develop novel analogues of the satiety hormone pancreatic polypeptide for the treatment of obesity. For Bloom, funding from the Trust came at a time when venture capital (VC) funding is particularly hard to obtain. He had previously been successful at raising VC funds for his spin-out company Thiakis, a biopharmaceutical company developing oxyntomodulin peptide technology for the treatment of obesity and associated conditions. Thiakis was acquired by Wyeth (now part of Pfizer) in December 2008 for an upfront fee of US$30 million and potential milestone payments of up to $120 million. However, acquiring funding to develop the pancreatic polypeptide analogue was more difficult. “We found that every VC company we visited wanted to fund drugs that had already been shown to be efficacious and safe in humans. The appetite for investing in biotechnology has diminished such that it is now very difficult to get funding for anything other than a tried and tested pill,” says Bloom.