News

By Lisa Rapaport
July 10 (Bloomberg) -- Pfizer Inc., Merck & Co. and Eli Lilly & Co., along with a Boston-based venture capital firm, are pooling $39 million to start a research-based company aimed at speeding the discovery of new kinds of medicines.

The three drugmakers and the investment firm, PureTech Ventures LLC, formed Enlight Biosciences LLC, of Boston. H. Robert Horvitz, a Nobel Prize winner from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is the co-founder of Enlight.

Enlight will focus on an area of research often avoided by academics: the creation of new tools to better identify which drug candidates may succeed in human trials. The goal is to avoid failures late in drug development, such as Pfizer's cholesterol pill torcetrapib and Lilly's AIR insulin inhaler, both abandoned after side effects emerged in large human trials.

"There have been a lot of technologies rolled out in recent years, like genomics and high throughput screening, that have yet to have a major impact on success rates in drug development," said Les Funtleyder, an analyst with Miller Tabak & Co. in New York, in a telephone interview today. ``There's no magic bullet here, but it's a relatively modest investment to try something new and see if it pans out."

New York-based Pfizer, the world's biggest drugmaker, rose 17 cents to $18.20 at 9:31 a.m. in New York Stock Exchange composite trading. Merck, of Whitehouse Station, New Jersey, rose 37 cents, or 1 percent, to $37.43. Indianapolis-based Lilly rose 40 cents to $48.77.

Clinical Trials
As part of the joint venture, researchers will try to find ways to make sure drugs will succeed in clinical trials, develop tools to predict human responses, and come up with techniques, such as imaging and biomarkers, that provide accurate readouts of both animal and human response.

"This novel collaboration has the potential to provide Merck with a creative means to harness academic innovation as a means to improve the probability of success for our winners while ensuring that our unsuccessful candidates are identified earlier rather than later," said Mervyn Turner, a senior vice president at Merck, in an e-mailed statement today.

Companies in the partnership may use any technology or tests developed to refine experimental drugs in their own labs, said Daphne Zohar, the managing partner of PureTech, in an e-mail interview today. In addition, Enlight is "in active discussions with other pharmaceutical company members" and "may partner with other venture firms as programs develop and require additional funding."

Zohar declined to disclose financial terms of the partnership.

"Instead of working separately to attack the same problems such as productivity and drug failures, combining forces enables these companies to make a bigger dent and come up with creative solutions to help the industry broadly, as well as their own internal efforts,'' Zohar said. ``By reducing the failure rate they will also cut the ultimate cost of bringing innovative new medicines to patients."

To contact the reporter on this story: Robert Greene in Washington at [email protected].