Drug companies to work together to speed up new products

Here’s a nice change:  profit-driven multinational pharmaceutical companies are seeing the value in collaboration and co-operation with competitors, it seems, to  get new medicines onto the market sooner.

Here’s hoping they spend just as much quality time making sure those medicines are safe, and don’t wait for the drugs  to kill people before they have to whip them off the shelves, as happened with the Vioxx scandal and others. Modern pharmaceuticals have proved to be as life-taking as many of them have been life-saving. MS

Ten big rival drug companies have formed a pact to cooperate on a US government-backed effort to accelerate the discovery of new drugs, the Wall Street Journal has reported.

The companies and the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) will share scientists, tissue and blood samples, and data, to identify targets for new drugs for diseases such as Alzheimer’s, Type 2 diabetes, rheumatoid arthritis and lupus, the Journal said.

The collaboration, called the Accelerating Medicines Partnership, will cost about $230 million and involves drugmakers such as Bristol-Myers Squibb Co, Johnson & Johnson, GlaxoSmithKline, Takeda Pharmaceuticals and Sanofi. The agreement prohibits participants from using any discovery for their own drug development until the project makes data public on that discovery.

The NIH, GlaxoSmithKline, Bristol-Myers, Sanofi, Takeda, and Johnson & Johnson could not be immediately reached for comments – Reuters.