Guest Post by Mene Pangalos, PhD of AstraZeneca: A New Approach at BIO: Partnering with Academia

We’ve been attending the BIO International Conference for years – it always provides excellent opportunities to speak to current and potential global partners in all disease areas and at various stages of drug development. This year we’re taking a fresh approach to our presence at the conference. Aside from ours and MedImmune’s exhibition space, we will also be hosting a ‘BIO Academic Zone’. This will be a dedicated break-out area in which we hope to bring together key professionals and institutions in licensing, tech transfer and the academic community. This is not only a first for AstraZeneca, but also for BIO – it certainly underlines the increasing interest in this area.

Why are academic partnerships important to us? While much of our current efforts focus on delivering our late-stage portfolio, we can’t take our eyes off the ball in terms of making our pipeline fully sustainable. Our focus on the health and innovation of our early stage portfolio is key to this and academic partnering can help us build additional strength and depth. One of my roles at AstraZeneca is to foster innovation driven by our scientists within AZ and helping to complement this innovation with the best cutting edge research from academia and the external environment. By bringing internal and external innovation together, we can continue our transformation and improve our ability to deliver successful projects and ultimately medicines to patients.

We have over 1,100 collaborations with universities, spanning Pennsylvania to Peking. To give two current examples, we recently joined an initiative led by the National Institutes of Health to match researchers with a selection of compounds to explore new treatments for patients. Here in the UK, we have also made an agreement with GlaxoSmithKline and the University of Manchester to create the Manchester Collaborative Centre for Inflammation Research. The goal is to establish a global, cutting-edge translational centre for inflammatory diseases.

In creating and hosting the BIO Academic Zone we’ve teamed up with the Massachusetts Association of Tech Transfer Offices (MATTO). MATTO, who will be with us in the BIO Academic Zone throughout the event, promote the transfer of knowledge and technology developed at academic institutions in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. They offer this service to companies that will develop and produce novel healthcare products. We’re very much looking forward to working with MATTO throughout the conference and meeting you in the BIO Academic Zone to discuss hot topics, potential opportunities and the licensing of university technology.

Mene. 

Come along to visit the BIO Academic Zone at the conference this week. You can find us in Booth 2555 - Hall B – BIO Academic Park

Menelas (Mene) Pangalos, PhD
Executive Vice President, Innovative Medicines, AstraZeneca

Dr. Mene Pangalos leads AstraZeneca’s global discovery research and early development activities for small molecules. He joined AstraZeneca in 2010 from Pfizer where he was appointed Senior VP and Chief Scientific Officer in Neuroscience Research at the end of 2009, following the acquisition of Wyeth. Prior to this, he was EVP and Head of Discovery Research at Wyeth. He is an Adjunct Professor of Neuroscience at the University of Pennsylvania and a visiting professor at the Wolfson Centre for Age-Related Diseases (King’s College London). He has edited the book “Understanding G-protein coupled receptors in the CNS” and a number of journal issues focused on drug discovery in the CNS. He has also published more than 120 peer-reviewed articles in well-known scientific journals.

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