NEWS OF THE WEEK
WIDENING NETWORK Pfizer is spending millions on five-year partnerships
PFIZER AUGMENTS ACADEMIC NETWORK COLLABORATION: San Diego hosts the drugmaker’s latest partnership
INVESTMENT
PARTNER(S)
GOALS
$100 million UC San Francisco
Build labs in Mission Bay, hire 30 scientists
$100 million Eight Boston-based institutions
Establish labs in Brookline, create about 50 jobs
$85 million
Seven New York Establish labs in New York City City-based hospitals
$50 million
UC San Diego
Hire 15 scientists at existing labs in La Jolla
SOURCE: Pfizer
P
FIZER HAS ADDED another node to a growing
network of academic collaborators intended to speed its discovery of protein-based drugs. The newest member of Pfizer’s Centers for Therapeutic Innovation (CTI)—the University of California, San Diego, Health Sciences—will receive up to $50 million in a five-year collaboration. The drugmaker launched CTI in November 2010 with UC San Francisco as its first partner. Pfizer has since announced CTIs in New York City and Boston. At each location, the company is setting up labs where its scientists can directly collaborate with university partners. Each lab will house a staff of antibody engineers, assay biologists, protein scientists, and project managers, Pfizer says. Under the CTI model, academic scientists submit proposals to a steering committee composed of university and Pfizer representatives. For every project that receives funding through CTI, Pfizer will pay for two postdoctoral or clinical fellows. For the UCSD project, Pfizer plans to hire about 15 sci-
NO PROGRESS ON NITRATE RUNOFF WATER: Flow of pollutant into the Gulf of Mexico is up 9% since 1980
D
ESPITE DECADES of effort to reduce pollu-
tion in the Mississippi River Basin, nitrate levels haven’t improved since 1980, according to a study from the U.S. Geological Survey (Environ. Sci. Technol., DOI: 10.1021/es201221s). Nitrogen and phosphorus fertilizer washes into groundwater and rivers that make up the Mississippi River Basin. Eventually this pollution makes its way into the Gulf of Mexico, where it feeds a dead zone, an area of low-oxygen water where many organisms cannot survive. But evaluating the effectiveness of policies to shrink the zone is difficult, says Lori A. Sprague, a USGS researcher. Weather variations, such as rainfall, cause yearto-year fluctuations in the amount of pollutants flowing into rivers, complicating analysis of runoff trends. Sprague and her colleagues used a statistical method to control for weather variations. The researchers ana-
entists to work with university researchers in dedicated lab space at the company’s site in La Jolla, Calif. The firm is already recruiting 30 scientists to work at its planned research center in San Francisco’s Mission Bay. Overall, the California collaborations could receive up to $150 million in research support and milestone payments if molecules they discover complete Phase I studies. Pfizer is one of several major drug firms attempting to leverage academic expertise to lower R&D costs and improve productivity. Kenneth I. Kaiten, director of the Tufts Center for the Study of Drug Development, says Pfizer’s partnering strategy is “particularly good” because it calls for industry and academic scientists to work side by side. “That’s something that a lot of the other plans in major companies exploring partnerships are not really allowing for,” Kaiten observes. In the process, he says, Pfizer gains access to cutting-edge science, and academics can tap into the company’s development and commercialization expertise.—LISA JARVIS
lyzed data collected RUNOFF Water from 31 states flows by USGS between through the Mississippi River Basin (shaded), 1980 and 2008 from eventually draining into the Gulf of Mexico. eight sites on the Mississippi and its tributaries. The researchers found that at sites on three tributaries, nitrate pollution had not changed. Meanwhile, pollution Mississippi River Basin increased by as much as 75% at five sites in the basin. Overall, they determined that the amount of nitrate flowing through the SOURCES: USGS, Map Resources basin into the Gulf increased by 9%. Gregory F. McIsaac of the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, says the researchers’ method is a boon for studying trends in nitrate pollution. But the trends they found are disappointing, he says: “We’ve been trying to address this problem for quite some time, and it doesn’t look like we’re making any progress.”—SARA PEACH, special to C&EN
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