Developing Tomorrow’s Drug Pipeline – an Overview of the East of England Collective Assets No one will argue with the success of Cambridge and the East of England as a therapeutics life science cluster. We’ve all seen these figures of the scientific excellence – 61 Nobel prizes in relevant subjects; economic powerhouse – £6bn turnover growing about 10% annually. But is it enough to be the place of choice to develop tomorrow’s therapeutics? In an ever-increasing complex sector with more convergence of technologies it’s not just about having innovative ideas and the right amount of cash – although it helps… but it’s about having the right value chain to supply technology support, fuelling the talent cross fertilisation and creating a virtuous circle of value creation. So how does the East of England drug pipeline look and what does it tell us about the regional strengths? An overview of the current drug pipeline A representation of the regional drug pipeline like here helps us understand the development stage and dynamic of companies developing these therapeutics. Deliberately excluding the large Pharmaceutical companies emphasizes on the group dynamic rather than the individual leader. The learning here is that with just under 100 SMEs having a recorded drug pipeline, the overall distribution is rather early stage, about 2/3 of the pipeline is in non-clinical phases which, compared to the reference cluster Massachusetts, is two-fold higher. Digging into the data it appears that only a quarter of the pipeline is small molecules, the rest being spread between antibodies, biologics, cell and gene therapy and new modalities. And without surprise, oncology dominates the therapeutic areas of application accounting for a third of all indications. This rather early stage pipeline mainly in innovative modalities requires strong technology support to develop which is actually what the other 70+ life science innovative SMEs in the East of England are doing.
Innovation in drug discovery With only 10% of what is considered as the ‘druggable genome’ targeted by approved drugs and most of the current research, there is a big potential for disturbing the drug discovery game that East of England companies are clearly addressing. About a dozen companies are deploying their expertise in -omics, epigenetics disease biomarkers, exploring the ‘dark genome’ as well as scouting ‘cryptic’ druggable sites. And these claims are not only trendy technologies, they are exciting the curiosity of drug developers like Boehringer Ingelheim and Otsuka, to name a few with no R&D presence in the cluster, who are increasing their outreach to these companies, providing credibility and expertise to these local companies to keep fuelling an innovative drug pipeline.
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