The Institute of Pharmaceutical Innovation

Friday 27th September, 2002 23m Funding for Institute of Pharmaceutical Innovation

Internationally, there has been considerable emphasis on the changing health care environment and increasing demands to cut the cost involved in producing medicines worldwide.

This has resulted in a desire of the EU for new drugs to be more quickly and effectively assessed during development and then to be brought fast to the marketplace. It is hoped through the work of the IPI to assist the industry in cutting the average time it takes for new drugs to be marketed, which in the EU is currently 13 years.

In the first phase of the research the IPI will work closely with local companies and large multinational pharmaceutical industry in exploiting research excellence in computer modelling and mathematical manipulation. This should ultimately lead to the speedier design of drugs, their testing, and formulating them into suitable medicinal forms. These new sophisticated computer methods, based on artificial intelligence will examine data and predict which drugs and their formulations are most likely to succeed.

Project Manager and Deputy Head of the School of Pharmacy, Professor Brian Clark, said: “Many drugs fail at the clinical trial and formulation stages, but by that time four or five years work has already been done. “We can take large amounts of information already known about drugs and potential drugs of the same type, and feed it into software packages and use that information to assess whether this drug can go through trials, and what is the right formulation.”

As a foundation, the IPI will call upon the extremely successful business and research experiences created in the “spin-off” companies generated by the School of Pharmacy’s exploitation of intellectual property commercialisation in this research field. These include bpd, which centres around improvements in the delivery of drugs and is now part of the multinational company Inhale Inc., California. The sale netted $200million in 2001 and bpd currently employs over 40 staff in Bradford.

A further example is AGT, formed in 1999, which has achieved considerable growth with the development of applications in the pharmaceutical, tissue engineering, agrochemical, oil and gas sectors. The new unit is to be built on the corner of Tumbling Hill Street and Richmond Road with building work expected to be completed in May 2003.

Apart from the computer-based focus of the IPI, the building will also house an Analytical Centre which will provide high quality facilities to sustain biochemical, pharmaceutical and chemical research of the University and also provide the potential to support local and national industry.

The Institute has been funded by a 2.3m grant from the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE).