Current practice and perspectives in CRO oversight based on a survey performed among members of the German Association of Research-Based Pharmaceutical Companies (vfa)

In recent years, the number and scope of outsourced activities in the pharmaceutical industry have increased heavily. In addition, also the type of outsourcing has changed significantly in that time.

This raises the question of whether and how sponsors retain the capability to select and to control the contract research organizations (CROs) involved and what expertise still has to be present in the development department as well as other relevant departments to ensure adequate oversight, also in line with the expectations of regulators and health authorities. In order to answer these questions, a survey was conducted among the German vfa member companies. The survey describes the latest developments and experiences in outsourcing by 18 German vfa member companies. It concentrates on measures how to implement Quality Assurance (QA) when performing outsourced clinical studies.

This study shows that the majority of companies apply a full-outsourcing, preferred-provider model of clinical trial services, with the clinical research department playing the major role in this process. A large amount of guiding documents, processes and tools are used to ensure an adequate oversight of the services performed by the CRO(s).

Finally the guiding principles for all oversight processes should be transparent communication, a clearly established expectation for quality, a precise definition of accountability and responsibility while avoiding silo mentality, and a comprehensive documentation of the oversight’s evidence. For globally acting and outsourcing sponsors, oversight processes need to be aligned with regards to local and global perspectives.

This survey shows that the current implementation of oversight processes in the participating companies covers all relevant areas to ensure highest quality and integrity of the data produced by the outsourced clinical trial.

Collaborative drug discovery for More Medicines for Tuberculosis (MM4TB)

Neglected disease drug discovery is generally poorly funded compared with major diseases and hence there is an increasing focus on collaboration and precompetitive efforts such as public-private partnerships (PPPs). The More Medicines for Tuberculosis (MM4TB) project is one such collaboration funded by the EU with the goal of discovering new drugs for tuberculosis. Collaborative Drug Discovery has provided a commercial web-based platform called CDD Vault which is a hosted collaborative solution for securely sharing diverse chemistry and biology data. Using CDD Vault alongside other commercial and free cheminformatics tools has enabled support of this and other large collaborative projects, aiding drug discovery efforts and fostering collaboration. We will describe CDD's efforts in assisting with the MM4TB project.

Four disruptive strategies for removing drug discovery bottlenecks

Drug discovery is shifting focus from industry to outside partners and, in the process, creating new bottlenecks. Technologies like high throughput screening (HTS) have moved to a larger number of academic and institutional laboratories in the USA, with little coordination or consideration of the outputs and creating a translational gap. Although there have been collaborative public-private partnerships in Europe to share pharmaceutical data, the USA has seemingly lagged behind and this may hold it back. Sharing precompetitive data and models may accelerate discovery across the board, while finding the best collaborators, mining social media and mobile approaches to open drug discovery should be evaluated in our efforts to remove drug discovery bottlenecks. We describe four strategies to rectify the current unsustainable situation.

Global phenotypic screening for antimalarials

Malaria, a devastating infectious disease caused by Plasmodium spp., leads to roughly 655,000 deaths per year, mostly of African children. To compound the problem, drug resistance has emerged to all classical antimalarials and may be emerging for artemisinin-based combination therapies. To address the need for new antimalarials with novel mechanisms, several groups carried out phenotypic screening campaigns to identify compounds inhibiting growth of the blood stages of Plasmodium falciparum. In this review, we describe the characterization of these compounds, explore currently ongoing strategies to develop lead molecules, and endorse the concept of a "malaria box" of publicly accessible active compounds.

The virtuous technology cycle concept and its application in next-generation sequencing

External access to scientific technology plays an increasingly important part in pharmaceutical R&D. One advantage of accessing technology externally is the avoidance of costs associated with purchase and the reduced time required for developing new methods; in addition, access to external scientific expertise can be beneficial. However, few conceptual frameworks exist for achieving an optimal mix of internal and external technology access. In this review, we describe the virtuous technology cycle (VTC) concept and exemplify its application to next-generation sequencing (NGS). Based on selected examples, we show that the VTC concept can greatly enhance the number of technologies accessed and thus significantly increase flexibility and efficiency in drug discovery. We also discuss the challenges of externally accessing NGS technologies.