Horizon Discovery and LGC get £360,224

Horizon Discovery Group plc, the international life science supplying research tools to organisations engaged in genomics research and the development of personalised medicines, together with LGC, an international life sciences measurement and testing company have been offered a research grant of £360,224 ($608,000 USD) by the UK’s innovation agency, the Technology Strategy Board, of which Horizon will receive more than half of the funding. The grant is awarded under the Technology Strategy Board’s Collaborative Research and Development (CR&D) project ‘Improving Cell and Tissue Analysis for Stratified Medicine’ and will fund a joint project run by the Company’s Horizon Diagnostics division in partnership with LGC.

The project will fund the research and development of a portfolio of novel reference standard materials in order to serve a high need area of clinical diagnostics.  The programme will establish methods and cross platform data sets to standardise existing ‘liquid biopsy’ genetic diagnostic tests, to determine test sensitivity, and to help drive the development of new more sensitive systems as well as training and proficiency testing schemes for pathology laboratories.

Minimally invasive ‘liquid biopsies’ of tumour cells and tumour DNA from the bloodstream can enable earlier primary and secondary diagnosis compared to solid tumour biopsies, as well as detection of metastasis and/or residual disease, and ‘real time’ monitoring of treatment effectiveness that isn’t possible with solid biopsy methods. Standardisation within and between facilities and across geographies will enable the uptake of minimally invasive cancer diagnostics as a routine clinical procedure

R&D market -Challenges

The Research and Development market has seen the greatest changes over the last 10 years within the industry. With big pharma wrestling to adapt a formerly successful model that each year is producing decreased levels of output, we are now amidst the middle of the cycle with a move away from investing in single large-scale R&D sites to diversifying interests across geographic regions, technologies and partnering firms.

This approach is leading itself to increased open innovation, out-licencing and in-licencing of technology, and outsourcing models that drive down development costs and even partnering and profit sharing arrangements.

The downsize of this approach has obviously been that it has decentralised regulation and increased the number of different methodologies used- meaning that many projects have a unique set of challenges and a greater degree of variants between timelines.

This model, however, has matured over the past couple of years and we are now seeing a solution that enables increased innovative output from the R&D industry, whilst maintaining a more standardized approach to R&D and, crucially, approaches to measure effectiveness and ROI.

This CPhI Pharma Insights Report examines the current trends in evaluation, adoption and partnering solutions that have been implemented across the industry to drive greater innovations and cost efficiencies.