AstraZeneca and UniQuest have announced a new collaboration aimed at supporting academic research proposals using ‘open innovation’ as a "catalyst" for drug discovery.
UniQuest is the commercialisation company of The University of Queensland (UQ). It facilitates collaboration and partnerships between business and the research expertise, intellectual property and facilities at UQ.
It has created over 70 companies from its intellectual property portfolio, and since 2000 UniQuest and its start-ups have raised more than $515 million to take university technologies to market.
UQ technologies licensed by UniQuest – including UQ’s cervical cancer vaccine technology and image correction technology in magnetic resonance imaging machines – have delivered combined sales of around $10 billion since 2007.
The new collaboration between AstraZeneca and UniQuest enables researchers based at UQ to access a specific collection of AstraZeneca candidate drugs and their related data to enable pre-clinical and clinical studies in areas of high unmet need.
The program will support UniQuest’s ambition to further expand UQ's engagement with industry with the ultimate goal of improving patient health. It will also give AstraZeneca the opportunity to engage with UQ and access its research and projects.
“This initiative is another important step towards the new era of medical discovery via open innovation and public-private collaboration.” said Dr Dean Moss, UniQuest CEO. “UniQuest is delighted to be partnering with AstraZeneca in this exciting approach towards the development of new treatments for patients and the advancement of medical science in Australia.”
"Successful proposals submitted by The University of Queensland’s researchers will be jointly funded by UniQuest and AstraZeneca to investigate human mechanisms of disease and to explore the development of novel therapeutic interventions across a range of therapy areas. This includes cardiovascular, metabolic, respiratory, inflammation, autoimmune, oncology, infection and neuroscience diseases," the organisations said in a statement.
Financial details of the agreement were not disclosed.
“We are proud and excited to be pushing the boundaries of science in the important area of open innovation with this partnership with UniQuest and The University of Queensland,” said Dr Ajay Gautam, AstraZeneca’s Executive Director, Scientific Partnering and Alliances for Asia Pacific and Emerging Markets. “By giving leading academic research institutions such as The University of Queensland access to our compounds and expertise, we are opening doors to unexplored areas of pre-clinical and clinical research to help find the next generation of medical breakthroughs.”