Pursuit of personalized anticancer therapy: leveraging collaboration between academia and the biotech/pharmaceutical industry.

Over the past 2 decades, our increased understanding of tumor biology has resulted in the delivery of a new generation of molecularly targeted cancer drugs with greater efficacy and less toxicity. This understanding has also provided pharmaceutical and academic institutions with a greater appreciation for the complexities and challenges associated with discovering and developing molecularly targeted drugs. To deal with the complexities of tumor biology and the associated technologies needed to develop molecularly targeted drugs, there has been increased cooperation and collaboration between academic and pharmaceutical-industry researchers in a broader number of aspects of the drug discovery and development continuum, including structural biology and translational research. This collaborative effort has played a role in molecularly targeted drugs such as cetuximab, trastuzumab, imatinib, and new promising drug candidates such as OSI-906. Cooperative efforts by industry and academia have also provided important insights to optimize the use of such agents in the clinic. This review aims to emphasize the need for academic/industrial collaborations for success and efficiency through the drug discovery and development continuum, and will highlight several examples of collaborations between academic and industrial scientists that facilitated the development of molecularly targeted antitumor agents into the clinic.