The Institute of Pharmaceutical Innovation

Wednesday 11th September, 2002 Drugs research coup for Bradford pioneers

The centre, on the University of Bradford campus, aims to slash the average time for new drugs to go on the market which is currently 13 years.

The Institute of Pharmaceutical Innovation will help blue chip drugs firms save time and money by using brand new computer modelling.

The Bradford scientists hope to play a key part in reducing the average time for developing a new drug to eight years.

Sophisticated computer systems housed in a new five-storey building will analyse data and predict which drugs are most likely to succeed in trials.

Professor Brian Clark, pictured, deputy head of the School of Pharmacy at Bradford who is the project manager, said: “The majority of drugs fail at the clinical trial stage, but by that time four or five years’ work has already been done.

“We can take a large amount of information already known about drugs of the same type, feed it into the software package, and use that information to assess whether this drug can go through clinical trials, and what is the right formulation.”

For a drug to go on sale it will still have to go through the standard process of clinical trials and registration.

But Prof Clark said the new centre and its `super computers’ will speed that up by ensuring less time is wasted on duds.

“If you have a breast cancer drug that is showing absolutely superb responses, you don’t want it in five years’ time you want it as quickly as possible,” he said.

The new Institute is being paid for by a 3.2 million grant from the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE). Once it is up and running next June, leading drugs companies including Pfizer and Astra Zeneca are expected to commission the university to carry out work.

The building will also be a new base for researchers in the School of Pharmacy, most of whom already carry out work funded by drugs corporations. The university will recruit a director for the new centre, someone from a business rather than academic background. It is projected to break even within five years.

Building work is starting within a few weeks, on a vacant plot on the corner of Tumbling Hill Street and Richmond Road, which is used as a car park.

The School of Pharmacy has already proved itself to be at the cutting edge of innovation: its researchers were behind a spin-off’ company called Bradford Particle Design which made $200 million when it was sold to an American firm in January 2001. A second spin-off company, Advanced Gel Technology (AGT), is expected to prove even more lucrative as the research has practical applications in the oil industry.