Business
Table 1: Principles for success in HTS core lab self sustainability
any small business, when faced with decreasing federal funding and the high costs of drug discov- ery. How can they survive, and indeed prosper, in this funding economy? This past year, the University of Kansas High Throughput Screening Laboratory achieved self-sustainability, and herein presents principles for achieving and maintaining self-sustainability for academic HTS cores. Though much of this discussion is focused on academic drug discovery service providers, it is applicable to any academic research support core. And this bat- tle for self-sustainability is a kinetic struggle, and must be constantly fought to maintain core facility financial stability through excellence in its service and logic in its business model.
drug lead identification1. With the fiscal and patent cliff issues surmounting pharmaceutical drug discovery, the pharmaceutical industry has adopted open innovation strategies with acade- mia to maximise their research capabilities at low cost and to feed their drug discovery pipeline. The new goals of academic research now encompass the full spectrum of chemical genomics and chem- ical biology, ranging from target identification and validation to compound library screening, probe development and in vivo efficacy assess- ment using small animal models. The academic need for a drug discovery infrastructure has led to establishment of HTS centres on many academic campuses over the past decade. The HTS labora- tories range from moderately equipped academic screening centres to well-endowed Molecular Libraries Probe Centers Network (MLPCN) cen- tres funded by the NIH Roadmap initiative2. These centres provide expertise and support to investigators in areas of probe/drug discovery in academia and execute primary, secondary and tertiary screening campaigns.
Extensive resources are invested in funding pur- chase and maintenance of equipment-heavy HTS labs. Since screening campaigns are labour- and cost-intensive, the overall cost to maintain and run HTS facilities on academic campuses has become a challenging issue. Many newly-minted academic HTS centres are struggling to survive, just as with
60
Academic service cores support the institutional investigators who have the funding, but not neces- sarily the technical expertise or instrumentation to fulfill their research needs, through unique and critical services, such as proteomics, imaging, NMR/Mass spectroscopy and HTS. Traditionally, most universities share the same types of cores, such as animal facilities, nuclear magnetic reso- nance (NMR), mass spectrometry, and the like, but the need for HTS cores is rapidly increasing in priority. These cores provide screening services and assist researchers in bridging the drug discov- ery gap between their basic research and preclini- cal drug development3. This is a difficult and sometimes risky gap, and can be very difficult for academic researchers to fund, often being described as too applied for NIH, or too early for pharma interest. Academic HTS cores step in at this point and take the biological target or assay of the investigator and screen for novel modulators against the target, which can result in novel probe tools for further research, or for potential leads for drug development.
Academic HTS cores often start off with strong backing and interest, which sometimes can dwindle if the needs of the greater academic community are not met adequately and in a time-efficient manner. Alternatively, many academic HTS cores originated in the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Roadmap for Medical Research4. These HTS labs were started or supported by the pioneering work of the Molecular Libraries Screening Centers Network (MLSCN) and the subsequent Molecular Libraries Probe Production Centers Network, initiated and supported by the NIH Roadmap. But with the end of the MLSCN, and soon the concluding of the MLPCN programme, several HTS cores lost, or will lose, much of their support and business. Likewise, all non-MLPCN HTS cores eventually lose their fun- damental founding financial support, the start-up
Drug Discovery World Winter 2011/12
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64 |
Page 65 |
Page 66 |
Page 67 |
Page 68 |
Page 69 |
Page 70 |
Page 71 |
Page 72 |
Page 73 |
Page 74 |
Page 75 |
Page 76 |
Page 77 |
Page 78 |
Page 79 |
Page 80