Collaboration Limits?

In a recent brief for Nature Reviews Drug Discovery, John Arrowsmith of Thomson Reuters reported the following information regarding Phase II clinical failures in the period 2008-10. Of the 108 reported failures, 87 listed reasons for failure and they were distributed in four categories as follows: Efficacy (51%); Strategic (29%); Safety (19% both preclinical and clinical); and PK/BA (1%).

When he combined these data with the biological target areas for the failed compounds, Arrowsmith made the following observation:

“Although it is difficult to draw conclusions from these data, the finding that a substantial proportion of Phase II failures were due to strategic reasons suggests that one important underlying factor could be overlapping R&D activity between companies with drugs in Phase II trials. This raises the question of whether an increase in collaborative efforts between companies up to the point of proof-of-concept for novel targets or mechanisms might be more cost- and time-effective.”

While I know many companies conduct joint development efforts on a single compound, I find the idea of multiple companies joining to conduct clinical target validation studies, potentially across a range of compounds, a very intriguing idea. It is one that has come up before, however, but in a more limited context...