India-based drugs company Taj Pharmaceuticals Group has set up a corporate venturing fund to support spin-out companies as peers plan novel approaches to future medical treatments.
The company was unavailable to provide further details.
Separately, UK-listed drugs group GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) has signed the first of 10 planned development deals with a leading academic while US peer Eli Lilly is raising $750m for three corporate venturing funds.
News provider Financial Times (FT) said Prof. Mark Pepys, head of medicine at the Royal Free and University College Medical School in London, would develop a treatment for a rare form of amyloidosis by staying in academia while GSK provided facilities, funding and performance fees.
Prof Pepys’ company Pentraxin Therapeutics receives a small upfront fee allowing GSK to gain an exclusive licence on the patents he has filed on his experimental drug.
Patrick Vallance, senior vice-president for drug discovery and development at GSK, told the FT he planned to sign 10 deals this year. He added to the newspaper: "We want a model that allows academics to work all the way through, getting a big reward if a medicine is launched and playing to their strengths. They could go to biotechs, or publish papers, but if they want to make a medicine, we will partner for the endgame."
However, Vallance told the FT that university technology transfer offices that typically seek to license academics’ ideas with high initial fees were excessively restrictive.
Also in the FT, Eli Lilly said it would raise up to $750m through three funds to share drug development costs and potential benefits with venture capitalists and external researchers.
Lilly will put up to $50m into each of three Mirror Portfolio funds containing up to 20 experimental medicines from different therapeutic areas, designed to take them through the high risk phase from a year before testing in humans until the mid-stage clinical trials, the FT said following on from reports of the planned commitments last year.
Lilly will provide up to half the experimental drugs to be tested by standalone virtual drug companies, substantially expanding its mirror pipeline of research and having first right of refusal on fair market terms to any that provide promising results.
An undisclosed venture capital firm participating in the Mirror Portfolio has already acquired two molecules and will oversee the next stage of their development, Lilly said. The first is a molecule developed pre-clinically by researchers at a major academic institution that is being studied as a potential treatment for congestive heart failure; the second molecule was developed by Lilly and is being studied for its potential in bone healing and cancer.
The Mirror portfolio aims to speed up this stage of development to three years at an average cost of $10m each, with Eli Lilly then having preferential access, the FT said.
Robert Armstrong, vice-president of global external research and development at Lilly, said: "The licensing of these molecules by the independent funds is an important milestone for the Mirror Portfolio.
"Another benefit of the Mirror Portfolio is that it provides access to capital, capacity, capability and deep disease expertise that can be focused on developing molecules generated in research institutions or biotechnology companies, with the potential for rights to successful molecules to be purchased by Lilly."
Jan Lundberg, executive vice-president of science and technology and president of Lilly Research Laboratories, added: "Lilly’s establishment of the Mirror Portfolio supports our innovation strategy which consists of three key components-molecule uniqueness, speed and cost efficiencies-which together are the cornerstone of our research and development philosophy."