Competitors try collaboration to speed drug development.

S haring data may be a venerable tradition in some research communities, but nobody in the world of drug development expects to collaborate with potential competitors. That situation may be changing, though, according to speakers at a workshop on precompetitive collaboration in cancer research, sponsored by the Institute of Medicine (IOM) last February. The hope is that such collaborations, just now getting under way and involving both academic and industry researchers, will boost the currently dismal 5% success rate for new anticancer compounds in drug development pipelines. “People are ready for change — everyone knows we need to work together on a framework that gets us out of the ‘one drug, 10 years, and a billion dollars to develop it ’ paradigm,” said Laura Esserman, M.D. , director of the Carol Franc Buck Breast Care Center of the University of California, San Francisco. One prime example of precompetitive collaboration that the workshop highlighted is the joint preclinical testing by AstraZeneca and Merck of a combination therapy for cancer, for which each company contributed a potential therapeutic agent. Another is the recently begun I-SPY 2 trial, which Esserman leads, that will test compounds and biomarkers from several companies in the same phase II study.