Strategic Alliance Magazine Q3 2017 - 28

BIOPHARMA KEYNOTE

Biopharma says [academics]
have unreasonable
expectations. It's the old
elephant [that everyone
touches and tries to describe
while blindfolded]-it depends
on what part you are feeling.
IL-11 (Neumega) and another for the use of fibronectin
in gene transfer (Retronectin). A portion of our interview appears in the July 2017 eSAM Plus. Our
conversation continues below.
What are the challenges you've experienced
in partnering, and how have you learned to
overcome them? What resources do you
leverage within BCH to help you manage
your partnerships with other companies
and organizations?

managing conflicts of interest. Our motive is we want to
develop things that help our patients, not so much the
motive of making money, but of course we have to run
our operations. We have a conflict of interest committee, and we have a business office that helps negotiate
licensing deals and helps us work with startups and to a
certain extent invest in them. We have some investment
money we use for our own IP [intellectual property]
when it makes more sense to build a company versus
license the IP. We have successfully started a number of
companies out of the hospital.
You've licensed several of your own patents,
including Neumega and Retronectin. What
have you learned from your experience
commercializing your patents and partnering
with companies such as Pfizer and Lonza?
With Neumega, it ended up being me and the chief scientific officer at the Genetics Institute at that time
[finalizing the agreement]. We got tired of waiting on
lawyers, decided on our own what the agreement should
be, and told the lawyers to implement it. For Retronectin, it was quite a different experience. For Neumega, we
received a royalty stream for a long period of time for
not a lot of up-front money, whereas with Retronectin,
we got a lot of up-front money but the royalty stream
was more complex to manage.

We have several alliance managers. In our gene therapy
program we have an executive who manages our alliances
in biopharma. We also have someone helping us liaison
particularly in the Boston-Cambridge area, where we have
a variety of opportunities, and we're developing a more formalized program with biopharma companies involving
networking meetings and dinners focused on particular
themes in biology, with the idea that this would allow them
to understand much better the science that's going on at
Children's. ... We have a variety of partnerships that I will
bring up at the time of my talk-and a variety of ways to
help invest in or help startup companies and use licensing
opportunities to help develop our drugs.

What I've learned is that each of these [partnerships] is
individual-and that academic centers often overestimate the value in dollars, whereas sometimes pharma
doesn't recognize the contribution at the academic level that's hard to monetize. There's an awful lot of
knowledge of the pathways of disease in the academic
centers. That contribution is hard to put a percentage
on, but it's invaluable. That's one of the difficulties of
the relationship. People say you [as an academic researcher] never get what you really deserve for what
you do for biopharma. Biopharma says you have unreasonable expectations. It's the old elephant [that
everyone touches and tries to describe while blindfolded]-it depends on what part you are feeling. n

On the other hand, it's often the case that the goals of
academic research are not completely aligned with the
goals of the biopharma research. It's one of the things we
have to manage. We have formal alliances with Pfizer,
Shire, and Sanofi, and those require understanding and

Follow the ASAP Media team's ongoing coverage before,
during, and after the Sept. 13-15, 2017 ASAP BioPharma
Conference on the blog at http://strategic-alliances.org.
Learn more and register for the conference at http://www.
asapbiopharma.org/17/.

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STRATEGIC ALLIANCE MAGAZINE | Q3 * 2017

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Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Strategic Alliance Magazine Q3 2017