Merck & Co, a US-based research-driven global pharmaceutical company, is looking at entering more research collaborations with Indian companies in the next 12-18 months. This is part of the company's strategy to reduce both costs and time involved with drug discovery, which is increasingly getting unviable owing to a success rate of 7%.Bharat M Chowrira, vice-president, Sirna Therapeutics, and executive director (licensing/ external research), Merck & Co, said the company was targeting research collaboration in India in the therapeutic diseases area including oncology, diabetics and neurological disorders.According to Chowrira, the democratisation of research in terms of collaboration with other pharmaceutical research companies in countries like India would help offset both costs and time especially in phase-1 drug development and clinical trials.Stating that there was just 1% improvement in the phase 3 success rate in drug discovery programmes across the industry since 1997, Chowrira said drug discovery programmes were becoming a tyranny with just 7% probability in success rate and the decrease in pipeline.The company already has two collaborations in place with Bangalore-based Advinus Therapeutics and Nicholas Piramal and achieved the first milestone research with the former three months ahead in November 2007. This has given the company the much-needed boost to look at expanding collaborative research. The company is planning to expand research and development (R&D) across Asia.Besides soliciting collaboration with Indian companies, Merck has entered into R&D-related agreements with several Indian research institutes, including the National Institute of Pharmaceutical Education & Research (Niper), and National Centre for Biological Sciences (NCBS). It is planning to support educational programmes to attract more research students in chemistry. Among the other initiatives, the company is planning to use the screening database of 600,000 RNA interference to help reduce the time taken in drug discovery besides developing personalised medicines.
