BOSTON – As budgets and success rates shrink, talk tends to be of organizations becoming leaner and meaner. But at a standing-room only session on Wednesday, speakers from government and industry looked at ways to become leaner and nicer instead, in the form of so-called precompetitive collaboration.

The FDA's Janet Woodcock, the National Institutes of Health (NIH)'s Francis Collins, Eli Lilly and Co's Jan Lundberg, Harvard Medical School's William Chin and Sanofi SA's Christopher Viehbacher gave their perspectives on where in drug development different developers – and government and academic researchers – might be able to fruitfully work together for mutual benefit, rather that duplicating efforts – or, put less generously, reinventing the wheel.

Sanofi's Viehbacher was blunt about the impediments to such collaborations. "There is a very real debate who, if this works out, is going to share in the spoils of victory," he told the audience at the session. "Each and every person in the private sector is under pressure to deliver more value. So there is a real friction here. . . . As polite as we all are to each other onstage, we are fierce competitors," and the notion of sharing anything goes against the grain.

But, he added, there is "clearly a need," and if sharing leads to faster information, there's incentives along with the friction.

Another incentive is money – not making it, but saving it. "Competition is great as long as you have enough funds to duplicate" work, Lundberg told the audience. But that's not always the case in the current economic climate.

Not every area of drug development lends itself to collaboration. For molecules, there can be the question of who owns the IP in the early stages. And even if those are worked out, a successful collaboration can run into antitrust concerns later in the game.

One alternative is repurposing of abandoned compounds, which has the advantage that if it works, it generates new intellectual property, which means that both companies can profit from the deal.

One promising area is shared information on targets and biomarkers, and research methods. The NIH, through its newest center, the National Center for Advancing Translational Science, or NCATS, has several collaborations in that area, both with industry and other government agencies.

"The mission," Collins stressed, "is not to turn the NIH into a drug development company. Instead, it's to identify where there are systematic bottleneck where the NIH could play a role."

Half of Phase II failures are due to lack of efficacy. To improve that statistic, he said, the NIH, the FDA and the Defense Advances Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, are collaborating to work on a human tissue chip to screen for safe, effective drugs. Such a chip could partly replace animal models, which Collins called "tried and true, but not quite as true as one would hope."

In clinical trials, too, there's room for sharing. Clinical trials, Viehbacher said, are "the lowest tech, most inefficient part of our business" – and an area where the U.S. is lagging.

In fact, he said, "If Janet [Woodcock] didn't require us to have a cohort here, I wouldn't do it." Basic research in the U.S., he said, "is good, but not development."

Partially that's because every clinical trial starts from scratch. "We waste a tremendous amount of time, collectively, by doing trials one-off," the FDA's Woodcock said. Clinical trial networks have begun to address that by working to standardize their trials. Collins advocated for expanding that network into a national one that included academic medical centers, but also community centers, where most patients are being treated.