Invited Speaker

Outsourcing Drug Discovery At Merck: Future Trends
David M. Stout
USA

The pharmaceutical industry faces many challenges. The pressure to reduce the cost of drug therapy is intensifying, especially in the United States as evidenced by the agreement between the major pharmaceutical companies and the U.S. government to lower the cost of drugs for the Medicare Part D assistance program. This occurs as many companies face revenue reductions due to the expiration of patents on blockbuster drugs and pressure from health insurers for patients to buy generic versions of branded prescription drugs. Further, pharmaceutical companies have begun to realize the enormous potential for sales of their products in emerging markets such as China, India and Brazil.

To address these issues in part, in 2008, Merck formed a new research site called External Basic Research (EBR) in which in a three to five year timeframe all of the laboratory work was to be carried out through collaborations with biotechnology companies and universities or through contracts with Contract Research Organizations (CROs). EBR would balance different types of partnerships with each of these institutions across all of the disease areas of interest to Merck and across the appropriate phase of the drug discovery pipeline. The premise was that, by developing a portfolio of external partnerships, strategic integration of innovative science from multiple sources would increase the overall probability of success in drug discovery. The ultimate goal of EBR was to supply 25% of Merck's preclinical candidate pipeline.

In order to direct the management and logistics of these relationships, a group was formed, Basic Research Sourcing Operations (BRSO), which was integrated with EBR. BRSO's role was to source CROs that were capable of conducting drug discovery projects and manage the operation of the collaborations, thus allowing the scientists of EBR to focus on the scientific issues of drug discovery.

This talk will explain the processes of EBR and BRSO and describe the strategy for external research collaborations.