BioWorld Today Correspondent

CHICAGO - Does the successful translation of science into innovative therapies require more and better science or better management of supporting activities, such as data management and collaboration?

The Translational Research Forum at the Biotechnology Industrial Organization international conference Monday offered no ready answers to that question. But it illustrated that better information tools and better data management practices are playing an increasingly important role in efforts to accelerate translational research.

"The power and ongoing evolution of our computing ability has made a big impact on what we can do," said Ted Mazzone, director of the University of Illinois at Chicago Center for Clinical and Translational Research.

Clinical data sources that were previously expensive and laborious to access are now being made available to researchers on a desktop. Biobank data also may become available in a similar fashion, once privacy concerns are adequately addressed, he said.

New York-based Pfizer Inc. also is embracing new methods of data integration, as part of its effort to find new ways of extending its product portfolio. Three years ago it began an initiative to find additional and non-obvious applications for existing compounds.

The number of opportunities was "pretty overwhelming," said Dean Welsch of the Indications Discovery Unit at Pfizer Global Research, while the associated data, he added, were "scattered throughout the organization."

Building novel information tools to allow seamless access to Pfizer's data assets became part of the effort. It also built collaboration tools to provide members of the Clinical and Translational Science Awards (CTSA) consortium with access to data and to compounds.

The actual ideas about repurposing old compounds flowed from CTSA consortium scientists. The outcome has been the movement of least five compounds into clinical development. "The pace is quite fast," Welsch said. The rate-limiting step has been commercial rather than scientific. Negotiating agreements on shared intellectual property and licensing has put the brakes on some projects.

Welsch's unit, which is based in St. Louis, is treated much the same as any other drug development unit within Pfizer. "The goals of our group are exactly the same as the rest of the organization - positive proof-of-concept studies in man," he said. Its steady target is to initiate one such trial every year. "That would be an overwhelming productivity enhancement for our organization, when you look at the FTE [full-time equivalents] involved."

Lewis Smith, of Northwestern University in Chicago, has looked to business process re-engineering as a means of speeding up the initiation of clinical trials, while also ensuring that the accelerated process can be executed with greater reliability and less variability than its forerunner was.

By simplifying the process and reducing the number of steps involved, the university and Northwestern Memorial Hospital have cut the number of days required to get a new contract approved from 80 to 90 days to about 45 to 50 days.

Stephen Kent, an academic scientist at the University of Chicago with longstanding industry experience, offered a dissenting view on the industry's prospects for accelerating drug development, at least in the small-molecule space. And his reasoning is based purely on science, rather than its management. "Small-molecule drug discovery has painted itself into a corner," he told the forum audience.

The emphasis on minimizing chirality over the past two decades - by using simplified combinatorial libraries - has not been fruitful. Chirality is itself core to biological interactions. "The best way of having specificity and selectivity in those interactions is having chirality," he told BioWorld Today. "The simple truth is they're at a dead end." A provocative talking point from day one of BIO.

The conference runs through Thursday.