Novo Nordisk invests in academic diabetes research
Phyllida Brown
London
Britain's National Health Service (NHS) is teaming up with a university
and a pharmaceutical company to build a $16 million center for research and
treatment in diabetes and other hormonal and metabolic diseases. The partners
hope that by bringing clinicians, academics and patients under one roof, they
will ensure that scientists ask the right questions, and that clinicians both
influence the research and act promptly on its findings.
The Oxford Centre for Diabetes, Endocrinology and Metabolism, which will
open by 2001, brings together six of Oxford University's biomedical and clinical
research teams working in diabetes and other hormone-related conditions, such
as osteoporosis. The center expects to handle some 15,000 outpatient contacts
per year. It will employ around 150 researchers and clinicians, and will offer
teaching and specialist training. The diabetes research will focus on areas
in which Oxford is already strong, such as the genetics of the disease, the
mechanisms of -cell failure, and large-scale clinical trials of treatments.
The university's diabetes researchers have collaborated with the pharmaceutical
company Novo Nordisk, Europe's largest supplier of insulin, for 20 years,
and it was they who approached the company to help fund the proposed center.
But despite investing 40 percent of the total cost of setting up the center,
Novo Nordisk's involvement will be relatively low-profile: it will not have
its name on the center, it will have no automatic rights to discoveries that
may emerge, and intellectual property rights will remain with the principal
investigators.
What Novo Nordisk is getting for its money, says David Matthews, previously
director of diabetes and endocrinology at Oxford's Radcliffe Infirmary and
now the center's chairman, is a close association with a world-class research
effort and the University of Oxford's credentials. There will be collaboration
so that each partner can influence the others' ideas, but if the company wants
to guarantee specific rights to any discoveries, it will have to commission
a project just like any other client.
As Novo Nordisk already has large commercial research bases for identifying
therapeutic molecules, it is understandable that its expectations from Oxford
are different. However, some observers believe that Novo Nordisk's management
may not be unanimous in backing such an open-ended commitment. One commentator
suggested that there was "a battle within the organization" between the company's
senior, traditionally philanthropic leadership and middle managers that want
targets and hard returns on investment. But publicly at least, the company
insists it favors the move whole-heartedly and sees no conflict between what
it calls "good neighbourliness" and its long-term business strategy.
"We see it as a natural development," says Stig Pramming, senior medical
director at Novo Nordisk's Danish headquarters. Oxford's reputation for diabetes
research makes it an obvious choice within Europe, he says. "We believe we
are the best diabetes company in the world...if we are going to be competitive
in the future we need to stay with the best and pick up the best ideas as
fast as possible."
Queen Margrethe II of Denmark meets representatives from the Karolinska
Institute and Novo Nordisk
The biggest financial backer, however, is the NHS itself, which is putting
in 42 percent of the cost of the center. Health service managers increasingly
need data on the cost-effectiveness of treatments and care regimens, and they
will be looking to the center for the kind of research that informs health
policy—known in the trade as 'outcomes data.' Pramming thinks the NHS
should be credited with "being visionary and taking an international view"
for its participation in the center.
The mastermind behind the center is Nuffield Professor of Clinical Medicine
at Oxford John Bell, who is also chairman of the partnership board. Bell hopes
it will stimulate "a renaissance of clinically based, bedside research, fuelled
by the molecular revolution." He says the reductionist approach of identifying
genes and molecules implicated in human disease has worked "fantastically
well," but that it is now time to add translational research to the effort.
"It's great to work with a knockout mouse," he says, "but if you have a human
with exactly that gene defect down the hall, it's interesting to know what
the phenotype of that disease is."
John Bell
Shortly after the initiative was announced, Novo Nordisk's largest shareholder,
the Novo Nordisk Foundation, announced separately that it was giving $16 million
to a consortium of Scandinavian researchers to investigate the vascular biology
of diabetes complications such as nephropathy and blindness. The Foundation
is separate from the company, although the company's board of directors are
members of the Foundation's governing body.
Ironically, although the Oxford center is emphasizing the importance of
putting clinicians and researchers under one roof in the hopes that they will
swap ideas over coffee, the Scandinavian consortium is entirely virtual, linked
only by e-mail and a generous travel budget. It would be "old-fashioned" to
have everyone in one building, says Karl Tryggvason, the consortium's lead
investigator, at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm.
-cell failure, and large-scale clinical trials of treatments.
