Temple of pharma - Speciality Chemicals Magazine

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1 Page 1 of 5 Fine Chemicals Temple of pharma Dr Magid Abou-Gharbia will be bringing the insights from a distinguished career to a key panel discussion at Chemspec USA. We caught up with him at Temple University in Philadelphia Like so many people in the US chemicals industry, Dr Magid Abou-Gharbia, director of the Moulder Center for Drug Discovery within the School of Pharmacy at Temple University in Philadelphia, knew Ben Jones during his time at the American Chemical Society (ACS). He frequently participated in ACS conferences, notably on one his favourite topics, the future of the 'chemical enterprise' as it relates to the pharmaceuticals industry. Naturally, then, when Jones became global consultant to the Chemspec events, Abou-Gharbia became involved in the conference that preceded the first Chemspec USA in Philadelphia last May. He chaired a high-level panel discussion entitled 'The Legends of R&D: Future of the Chemical Enterprise Pharma, Chemical & Crop Protection'. This featured Dr Pat Confalone, VP of global R&D for DuPont Crop Protection, Dr John LaMattina, former president of Pfizer Global R&D and now director of Human Genome Sciences, and Dr Paul Anderson, former ACS president and former senior VP at DuPont. Chemspec USA returns to the Philadelphia Convention Centre on 8-9 May The format will change somewhat, with the well-received panel sessions being part of the exhibition and in a single stream, rather than standing alone and in parallel sessions as they did in Once again, though Abou-Gharbia will be heading a panel of key R&D executives, this time comprising Dr William Murray, vice-president of global outsourcing at Johnson & Johnson, Dr John Ellingboe, senior vicepresident for drug discovery at India's GVK Bio and (provisionally) Dr Christian Görtz, head of global category clinical trial services at Boehringer-Ingelheim in Germany. Like this year's panel, the Chemspec USA 2012 panel will have short presentations and long discussions, prompted by questions from the floor, which Abou-Gharbia sees as key to a good discussion. The subject will be 'Best Practices in Outsourcing'. Considering that ACS member companies have shed 400,000 jobs in the past eight years, including 150,000 in the last two, largely as a result of Big Pharma mega-mergers, it is surprising how little attention has been given to this.

2 Page 2 of 5 The Moulder Centre was officially opened in 2008 "Outsourcing is an established trend in pharma and the life sciences," says Abou-Gharbia. "So it is vital to discuss the best practices in terms of getting productivity and creativity into the process. Productivity is a common yardstick and is, at least to some degree, measurable." Creativity, however, is more difficult to quantify and is often ignored in the outsourcing process, where price is the main yardstick. However, in Abou-Gharbia's view, creativity should be seen as a vital part of the process - and he speaks as pioneer in academic-industrial collaboration who has spent his career on both sides of the academic-industrial fence. An Egyptian by birth, Abou-Gharbia took his BSc and MSc in Pharmacy & Pharmaceutical Sciences at Cairo University, then a PhD in Organic Chemistry from the University of Pennsylvania in This was followed by a National Institute of Health post-doctoral fellowship at Temple's Chemistry Department until In 1982, he joined Wyeth and spent 26 years there working in drug discovery research. As senior VP for chemical and screening sciences, he headed a research team of 500 scientists at four US research sites. In addition, he was responsible for 150 more who were employed by GVK Bio in Hyderabad, India, but worded exclusively for Wyeth. It was through this experience that he developed an appreciation of the importance of encouraging creativity in outsourced partners. At a time when the general attitude was to simply throw outsourced research efforts 'over the fence', Wyeth entered into a five-year contract with GVK Bio and set up a dedicated research facility to support the research efforts there. Abou-Gharbia also assigned a series of colleagues - Ellingboe himself was the first - to spend two to three months embedded at Hyderabad to see first-hand how business was conducted at GVK. Over 26 years at Wyeth, Abou-Gharbia and his teams of scientists worked on drugs for womens' bone and health conditions, neuroscience, inflammation, oncology and cardiovascular disease therapy. He participated in drug discovery, leading to six marketed drugs - Effexor, Pristiq, Sonata, Mylotarg, Torisel and Tygacil - as well as dozens of other candidate compounds in clinical development.

3 Page 3 of 5 Abou-Gharbia - Vital to discuss best practices in outsourcing Although he holds about 100 US patents and over 350 worldwide patents and has over 220 publications, presentations and invited lectures, plus a long list of other honours, Abou-Gharbia is most proud of what his teams have achieve in terms of alleviating patient suffering. Down the years, it is reported, the drugs discovered in his time at Wyeth have helped about 19 million people. Abou-Gharbia's other great passion is teaching. In 2008, wanting to teach drug discovery to a new generation of scientists, he returned to academia and joined the faculty of the school of Pharmacy at Temple. The Moulder Centre for Drug Discovery Research was established with the support of the university and a gift from Drs Lonnie and Sharon Moulder, who had both graduated from Temple in Although about 15% of the jobs and the economic activity in greater Philadelphia are linked to the pharmaceuticals and life sciences industries, the Moulder Centre is the first fully integrated academic drug discovery centre in the region. At the outset, it basically comprised Abou-Gharbia himself and a single laboratory. Now, there are 15 scientists in seven laboratories, with three more being refurbished, plus a full array of drug discovery, facilities and equipment. The Centre is continuing to expand and build capacity for further research programmes. It can perform research at all levels of drug discovery, using advanced techniques to develop novel candidates for known drug targets and explore novel pathways that have only recently identified as potential avenues to therapeutic agents. The stated aims of the Centre are the "discovery of biologically active drug candidates, the synthesis of chemical probes to test biological hypotheses, facilitating collaborative research among Temple University researchers and with external collaborators in the US and abroad, and training undergraduate and graduate students, junior faculty, post-doctoral fellows and visiting scientists on state-of-the art enabling technologies for modern drug discovery and development". To Abou-Gharbia, the key part of the mission is to train the next generation of drug discovery scientists through hands-on experience. Collaboration is also stressed. "Modern drug discovery efforts require scientists to work in teams that often span international boundaries, so it is important that the next generation of scientists understands the value of collaboration," he says.

4 Page 4 of 5 Staffing levels have risen to 15 in the past three years The Centre thus has various academic collaborations, notably with Perugia University in Italy and King's College, London. In 2009, it also signed a collaboration agreement with the Future University of Egypt off the back of a series of lectures on drug discovery Abou-Gharbia gave here and at other universities in Cairo. This currently covers Temple's schools of Pharmacy, Engineering and Dentistry, but should be applied to the rest of the university in time. "We have several home-grown projects ongoing to address unmet needs in such therapies as Alzheimer's, cardiovascular diseases and cancer, but we are also open to pharmaceutical contract research," Abou-Gharbia says. Examples include work with Cureveda, a biotech founded by Johns Hopkins University researchers, on a wide range of oxidative stress-related diseases, with Swedish biotech Cortendo on metabolic syndrome and with the University of Rochester Medical Centre in New York on various diseases, including bacteria resistance. Most recently, at the end of November, the Moulder Centre concluded a multi-year integrated drug discovery collaboration with GVK Bio itself. GVK will identify interesting small molecules agaisnt specific targets and take responsibility for reagent generation and establishing the screening cascade leading to lead identification and optimisation. The two will work together to design the molecules for this programme. The Centre is unique, according to Abou-Gharbia in that it carries out basic and contract research within the pharmaceuticals industry. As well as the 140+ years of research and project management experience that its staff combines, it can operate in an inherently flexible way, offering help with project management, for example. This is becoming a critical component of outsourcing as large pharmaceuticals companies increasingly outsource what were once core capabilities. In addition, it focuses on the area of drug design rather than just drug discovery. As Abou-Gharbia puts it: "Drug discovery begins with drug design. Without drug design, you will never have good drugs developed." This can take several forms. One is simply the use of existing knowledge to create 'me-too' compounds. "This approach has been effective in the past, but may have limited value in the future," says Abou-Gharbia. Alternatively, it can mean identifying natural chemicals in the body, determining their function, elucidating their structure, and developing new molecules using computer-assisted design to imitate their function. Or, best of all, one can carry out structure-based development based on x-ray crystal structures and homology models of natural proteins." Certainly, the Centre's business model is attracting plaudits. In August, Abou-Gharbia was given the Henry F. Whalen, Jr. Award for Business Development at the ACS's 242nd National Meeting in Denver and gave a

5 Page 5 of 5 keynote address on the subject. The award particular recognised his "ability to build and lead modern, multidisciplinary research teams, foster a highly creative R&D environment and successfully discover marketplace drugs". There will surely be more still to learn by the time Chemspec USA comes around again. From Online Issue: December 2011 Privacy Policy Terms & Conditions Quartz Business Media Ltd. 2012