Interview : MedImmune growing globally with collaborations
A featured speaker for the BioPharm America plenary panel discussion of the shifting landscape for transactions, Sun Park, Vice President for Business Development at MedImmune, took a few minutes to update Partnering News on developments at the company one year after its acquisition by AstraZenenca and plans for future collaborations.
Partnering News : How is the evolving Bio/Pharma drug development landscape affecting transactions?
Sun Park : The risk/benefit calculation that each company makes as part of any transaction has become much more unpredictable. From the big pharma point of view, we have seen extremely large and high-risk bets like full acquisition of phase 1 assets. At the same time, we have seen those same companies working hard to de-risk other assets by entering into co-development or asset pooling deals, decreasing the potential upside but spreading out their pool of risk.
Partnering News : How has the acquisition by AstraZeneca in 2007 impacted MedImmune’s growth?
Sun Park : Since our acquisition, we have increased our R&D portfolio, expanded our headcount, research capability and manufacturing facilities, and more than doubled our investment in R&D. Our long term objectives include 6 first-time-in-human trials and 7 CDs per year, and one BLA per year (starting in 2013 for the latter). In addition, we are targeting for biologics to ultimately comprise approximately 25% of AZ’s overall portfolio.
Our goal is to continue to maintain our unique position in the biotechnology sector but do so now on a global basis.
Partnering News : How has the acquisition impacted MedImmune’s business development unit specifically?
Sun Park : MedImmune is wholly owned by AstraZeneca, but remains operationally independent, particularly in several key functions, including business development. Our business development group continues to lead transactions in all stages that involve biologics products or technologies. In particular, the acquisition has significantly enhanced MedImmune’s position as a partner of choice for large and small companies alike. MedImmune can bring industry-leading strengths across the full spectrum of the product development cycle, including research, antibody engineering, global clinical and regulatory development, manufacturing, and global sales and marketing in both specialty and primary care indications.
Partnering News : What is MedImmune’s Business Development teams’ role?
Sun Park : MedImmune’s Business Development team focuses on business opportunities that support the company’s biologics strategy across all therapy areas relevant to our parent company, AstraZeneca. We are responsible for identifying biologic product opportunities, as well as intellectual property and technologies that may enhance or extend technology platforms and products. These efforts not only include in-licensing but also out-licensing/externalization of our own technologies.
Partnering News : What types of collaborations is MedImmune currently pursuing?
Sun Park : We are highly flexible in the type of relationships we form – this is critical when building partnerships to help deliver both our company’s and our partners’ strategies. In addition to the traditional global in-licensing transactions, we also actively pursue co-development and cost-sharing deals, multiple-product option deals, geography-specific deals, and strategic acquisitions.
Partnering News : Can you give some examples of successful collaborations MedImmune has been involved in?
Sun Park : A great example is our reverse genetic technology, which is useful for pandemic influenza vaccines because the process does not require manufacturers to work directly with potentially highly infectious pandemic strains, such as H5N1, rather only segments of the virus’s genome.
We have offered other influenza vaccine manufacturers non-exclusive licenses to this intellectual property for use in manufacturing seasonal or pandemic vaccines, including Novartis, GlaxoSmithKline, sanofi pasteur and CSL Limited of Australia to support the development and construction of new vaccine strains to produce inactivated seasonal, pre-pandemic and pandemic influenza vaccines.
VLP technology/HPV Vaccine is another example of a successful collaboration as it created a foundation for Merck and GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) to successfully develop their HPV vaccines.
In 1997, we partnered with GSK to further develop the HPV vaccine. Together we completed three Phase 2 trials and a large 3,000 patient epidemiology study that focused on the HPV vaccine now known as Cervarix®. GSK is responsible for the final development of the product, as well as regulatory, manufacturing, and marketing activities. In exchange for exclusive worldwide rights to our VLP technology, GSK agreed to provide us with an up front payment, equity investment and research funding, as well as potential developmental and sales milestones and royalties on any product sales.
In addition to our partnership with GSK, we have also sub-licensed rights to our VLP technology to Merck, through GSK, in early 2005. We receive certain milestone payments and royalties on future development
and sales of Gardasil®.
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