Moffit & Merck info:
"Dr. William Dalton, Moffitt's CEO, said the project has been four years in the works. It stems from significant advances over the past decade in mapping the chemical building blocks of human beings and the cancers that afflict them.
M2GEN will work with other medical facilities around the state to build a database of up to 30,000 tissue samples and patient medical histories to determine which types of people and cancers respond best to different types of treatment, and which ones don't. Ultimately, they hope to be able to tailor treatment to patients based on their genetic makeup and what it says about how they may respond to different drugs.
"We will be able to determine which types of patients respond to therapy and which ones don't," Dalton said. "Rather than just blind treatment, each individual will get their own unique therapy based on their unique profile."
In return for its contribution to M2GEN, Merck will have exclusive access to the tissue bank database Moffitt is assembling. "They will not have access to the patients' identities; that will be safeguarded," said Moffitt spokeswoman Michelle Foley. "But they will have access to the data."
The bet, Foley said, is that Merck, with many more researchers than Moffitt, will be able to move promising discoveries along the path to marketable drugs faster. And M2GEN will share in any profits.
Though this is the first time Moffitt has spun off a for-profit venture affiliated with a drug company, its cancer researchers have long worked with major pharmaceutical companies on clinical drug trials and research. "And this arrangement keeps us open to partnering with other drug companies going forward," Foley said.
Merck's agreement to put an unspecified number of dollars into Moffitt's research in return for exclusive access to M2GEN's tissue bank database reflects an industry trend. New drug compounds are increasingly being discovered at small biotech companies or research institutions, then being shepherded through the costly and time-consuming approval process by the big pharmaceutical companies. On its Web site, Merck said it has "hundreds of academic collaborators and significant partnerships with biotech and pharmaceutical companies."
"With the advent of the biotechnology era," the Web site says, "We understand that 99 percent of the world's biotechnology research takes place outside of Merck Research Laboratories."
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