By Mary Welch

OSI Pharmaceuticals Inc. will receive up to $50 million over the next six years in research and development funds from Anaderm Research Corp., through financing from Pfizer Inc. to discover and bring through preclinical development pharmacologically active compounds for "cosmeceutical" indications.

"It's an entrepreneurial venture," said Arthur Bruskin, executive vice president of drug discovery for OSI and a vice president of Anaderm. The deal provides a virtual drug-discovery company through which New York-based Pfizer can enter cosmeceuticals.

Uniondale, N.Y.-based OSI, Pfizer and some faculty members from New York University (NYU) founded Anaderm in 1996. Pfizer owns 82 percent of Anaderm; OSI owns 14 percent; and NYU faculty members four percent. In 1997, Pfizer entered into a second round of financing, putting $12 million into the venture.

The just-disclosed collaboration will focus on the discovery and development of quality-of-life indications, such as skin pigmentation enhancers and inhibitors, as well as wrinkle control and hair growth, said Matthew Haines, spokesman for OSI.

"These are pharmacologically active compounds," he said. "The collaboration is developing drugs, not skin bleaching techniques. They will be clinically tested and go through FDA approval before commercialization."

OSI will function as the drug discovery and preclinical development arm of Anaderm, a role it has served from the start of Anaderm's formation. The services OSI will provide include: assay biology; high-throughput screening; compound libraries; combinatorial, medicinal and natural product chemistry; and pharmaceutics, pharmacokinetics and molecular biology.

To meet the demands of the work, OSI will staff up to 45 scientists over the next 18 months.

"OSI has the capabilities to take a compound through Phase II efficacy trials, and we may, in fact, do that in this collaboration," Haines said. "But, at some point, Pfizer will take over and bring the compounds through pivotal trials and the FDA licensing and regulations process."

This is not the first deal between OSI and Pfizer. The two firms have been involved in developing a class of orally active, molecularly targeted, small-molecule anticancer drugs based on oncogenes and tumor suppressor genes since 1986. The two recently reported that data from two Phase I trials of CP-358,774, an oral inhibitor of epidermal growth factor receptor tyrosine kinase, achieved therapeutically relevant levels. The compound is now in Phase II.

The companies also discovered a second compound, CP-564,959, which inhibits a key protein tyrosine kinase receptor involved in blood vessel growth (angiogenesis), which is in preclinical trials. Two others also are in the preclinical stage.

Bruskin said the newer collaboration "is an entirely different program and focus," said Bruskin. "But the CEO of Anaderm was the former director of the cancer department at Pfizer, so we have had a long relationship with him."

Will it be a trend for big pharmaceutical companies to use biotechnology firms to enter smaller and lesser known arms of the industry, such as in this deal? Should biotechnology companies alter their strategies to entice collaborators? Talk it over in the BioWorld forum by clicking on the "Forums" tab at the top of this page.