Objective

In 2012 AstraZeneca (AZ) and Pharmaron (PHA) began a strategic partnership to support AZ's global Innovative Medicine and Early Development (IMED) Biotech Units.  Under this multi-year agreement, PHA provide AZ with discovery services in the areas of chemistry and drug metabolism and pharmacokinetics (DMPK).  PHA conduct these services with a team of scientists in dedicated, state-of-the-art, research laboratories located in Beijing, China.

Previously AZ had a mixed operating model within global DMPK whereby screens were run on multiple local AZ sites. Thus AZ has benefitted from the partnership by the transition to a single homogenous screening platform. In addition the co-location of external screening and chemistry services at PHA enables rapid delivery of data for compounds synthesized by PHA.  Indeed, turnaround times from test request to data delivery for all DMPK tests at PHA, which includes time taken for compound delivery from AZ sites to China, of less than 10 days are achieved.

This poster will describe the continued success of the partnership over the last 5 years, where the strong ethos of collaboration and integration of PHA scientists into AZ projects and high levels of communication have ensured that issues are resolved effectively and high quality data is delivered. It is an excellent example of external partnering as an enabler to drug discovery.