Med school joins with drug firm

Penn's School of Medicine has made a deal with a major pharmaceutical firm to develop drugs more quickly.

The school stands to benefit financially from the arrangement, made last week, and gain access to clinical and pharmacological resources at AstraZeneca PLC, the seventh-largest pharmaceutical company in the world.

The firm, in turn, will gain greater access to Penn researchers and their scientific expertise.

"They don't have a huge base of scientists that can dig into things the way that we do,"‹¨« Penn Director of Corporate Alliances Terry Fadem said.

Although Penn and the Wilmington, Del.-based AstraZeneca already cooperate on several projects, their new agreement "allows the two organizations to more efficiently and effectively work together in answering research questions," AstraZeneca spokesman Chris Sampson said.

Initially, their joint research will focus on neuroscience drugs such as Seroquel, AstraZeneca's current blockbuster antipsychotic medication, which earns $2.6 billion in annual sales, Sampson said.

Relationships such as this one will likely be more common for Penn Medicine in the future because of an expected flat budget at the National Institutes of Health, Fadem said, which funds much of Penn's medical research.

"There's a necessity on the academic institution's part to look for other funding," he said.

Penn already has research relationships with more than 200 companies, Fadem added.

Although businesses provide 10 percent of Penn's total research money, he added that there is little risk that such funding will bias results.

"It's not significant enough in size to really taint anything that's going on here,"‹¨« Fadem said. "We're matching interests, we're not pushing anybody in a particular direction."

Penn has long been a leader in corporate collaboration. Fadem's office was the first corporate-relations department to be installed in a medical school. Now, there are eight or nine in the country, Fadem said.

The University is not alone in its medical collaborations with businesses. Last year, the pharmaceutical firm Pfizer Inc. opened a $35 million clinical research facility in New Haven, Conn., to be close to Yale University researchers, a Yale spokeswoman said.

But Penn is particularly well-positioned to forge relationships like the one with AstraZeneca in part because of its close proximity to many major pharmaceutical companies' offices, he said.

"If you need to talk, if you need to visit a lab, if you need to interact with a large team of people," it just makes sense, Fadem added.

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