Drug development requires more collaboration

Jordi Quintana, head of the drug discovery platform at Barcelona’s Science Park, attends São Paulo School of Advanced Science and stresses need to join forces to combine the best of academia and industry.

By Maria Fernanda Ziegler  |  Agência FAPESP – There is a gap between academia and the pharmaceutical industry in new drug discovery and development, and continuous collaboration between them guarantees greater efficiency. This is the view of Spanish researcher Jordi Quintana, a professor at Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona and, for ten years, head of the drug discovery platform and scientific director of business development in the city’s Science Park, a cluster of three public research centers with some 100 corporations and startups.

Visiting Brazil to attend the São Paulo School of Advanced Science on Medicines: from Target to Market, held at the University of São Paulo’s Ribeirão Preto School of Medicine (FMRP-USP) with FAPESP’s support in March 2018, Quintana delivered presentations on collaboration between academia and industry and on the need for integration between the two in various research fields.

“In my case, moving from industry to academia was an opportunity to develop something completely novel in Spain, by combining chemistry, medicine and biology and by doing interesting research and projects,” he said.

Quintana began his career in the pharmaceutical industry and was a leader of the International Rare Diseases Research Consortium (IRDiRC). Although he says he is fortunate to have had this experience, which to some extent came about by chance, Quintana advocates collaboration between industry and academia. “It’s the most efficient way to develop new drugs,” he said.

Here is the interview Quintana gave Agência FAPESP.

Agência FAPESP – Why is it still so difficult to discover and develop new drugs?
Jordi Quintana – To find a new drug, you need three elements: a lot of people working together with knowledge in different fields, especially biology, chemistry and clinical research; financing for all the operations; and knowledge about the disease. The three components are difficult by themselves, and combining the three is even more difficult.

Agência FAPESP – In one of your presentations to the São Paulo School of Advanced Science on Medicines, you spoke of the need for collaboration. Why is lack of collaboration an important factor in low efficiency?
Quintana – Collaboration between academia and industry is important because of the complexity of diseases and of the entire drug discovery and development process. To discover a new drug, you have to cover several different fields. Basically, it entails obtaining compounds or products that treat or cure a disease. But understanding the mechanisms of a disease and the strategies to halt its advance is also highly complex. To deal with this complexity, it’s more efficient to combine the knowledge and prior experience of academia and industry with a common goal, which is curing a specific disease. Another important point is that scientists should be open to areas that are complementary to their research. If their focus is chemistry, for example, it’s good to know what biologists are doing and what’s going on in pharmacokinetics. You need curiosity, and you need to be interested in knowing how they succeeded in getting certain results or what results they’re looking for. This happens naturally in industry, because achieving a goal for a disease, for example, is important for the entire firm. The way they achieve this integration resides in the way they build the project. One of the challenges facing academia is building projects and detecting issues during the process alongside other experts.

Agência FAPESP – There have been major innovation efforts in the life sciences but tending toward digital health and prevention strategies rather than drug development. What’s your view on this?
Quintana – Digital health and e-health are growing. It’s the combination, again the integration, between two fields, information technology and healthcare. Whenever two different fields are integrated, you get innovation. In the field of healthcare, you can prevent the need for drugs to be developed because you have e-health or digital health systems. Let’s say they control your blood pressure: therefore, you may not need a drug for blood pressure because you can take action before that. On the other hand, developing new drugs will be there forever because there are many diseases that have no drug treatment. The point is the need to make drug development more efficient. 

Agência FAPESP – In terms of innovation, how can information technology and bioinformatics help drug discovery?
Quintana – Innovation is increasing because of the explosion of data from the large amount of new research. Bioinformatics and computer-aided drug design are quite new technologies whose strength and importance are increasing every day for two reasons. The first is that new technologies and new developments are happening in these young fields. The second is that today, more and more data are being produced by many academic laboratories and industrial laboratories across the world. Only by using bioinformatics and computer-aided drug design technology can you analyze and integrate all these data. 

Agência FAPESP – During your career, you transitioned from industry to academia. You also worked in the International Rare Diseases Research Consortium, which combines experts from academia and industry. What made you switch from one to the other so many times?
Quintana – Being involved in these two environments was a great opportunity to do research and interesting projects. In my case, moving from industry to academia was an opportunity to develop something entirely new in Spain by combining chemistry, medicine and biology. That couldn’t have been done in industry. Later on, I was also fortunate to work both in academia and in industry in the field of drug discovery.

Agência FAPESP – Would you advise younger scientists to do the same?
Quintana – Yes. There are uncertainties in many things in life. In the case of students doing PhD or postdoctoral research, I would say the choice of going into academia or industry is not that important. The really important thing is to be open to new possibilities and to be interested in one particular challenge, regardless of whether you’re in industry or academia. These challenges can change later in life. The reason industry is working more and more with academia is the complexity of drug discovery and development, so joining forces with people who are more knowledgeable about the first part of the process [basic science] together with the knowledge and experience of industry in the second part [application] is essential.