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If all the projects work, that’s a bad sign.
Why is it interesting for a government to get involved in things like this?
The challenge is enormous.
The world needs new medicines.
The world needs especially new medicines in the area of infectious diseases, the neglected
diseases.
And the problem so far has been because of the lack of investment, the lack of getting
people together, that it’s just nog moving fast enough.
What’s interesting is that if you compare the drugs that were discovered twenty years
ago, with what’s happening now, then you see that there are certain disease areas where
we’re no longer doing any research, as a pharmaceutical industry, as a Europe, if you
like.
One of them is in anti-infectious disease, so it’s not just diseases like malaria,
but bacterial infections, things that will affect you and me eventually.
If you want to now, and in the future, achieve innovations for diseases, where there are
no solutions currently available, then we need that collaboration between the different
parties;
Academia, industry, patients, governments, we all need their collaboration and the synergy
that is being derived from these sort of collaborations.
Why is it interesting for a government to get involved in things like this?
Because we found out, that if we have an idea about the societal needs, for a solution for
healthcare for years to come, and we are able to articulate them, that it’s proved to
be very helpful to have a model of partnering, in which we can meet partners that offer solutions
for these societal needs.
Running these partnerships is a profession by itself.
And you need professionals to do that, preferably they should be independent of the partners
cooperating within the partnerships, and I think TI Pharma is an excellent example of
how you can successfully operate these partnerships in a very professional way.
TI Pharma is all about partnerships.
When you want to have a solution for a certain unmet medical need
and for example you have SME’s with certain protein technology.
You have academic groups with certain knowledge, expertise, on for example a bacteria.
You have a large industry, which have the capabilities for really the development of
a new drug.
And you have funders, like charities, governments, who want to invest in getting solutions for
a certain unmet medical need.
And that’s what we do within TI Pharma.
We bring these partners together, and we offer them the governance to really collaborate
with each other, and contribute together to develop a certain solution.
If you are creating consortia, with more academic partners and more industrial partners, things
become complex.
And in the current climate where financial, let’s say, deliberations are sometimes the
motive of academic partners, to participate in these projects, it’s difficult to keep
everybody aligned and focusing on the point at the horizon, that is meant to be achieved
at the end of the project.
So that coordination is vital for the success of the project in the end.
Finally it’s a question of saying well, when have we got something, which could be
handed over either to a company, or could be made into a company.
But when is the endgame, so when do we know that we’ve arrived?
Naturally people don’t want to make that decision.
So TI Pharma is part of the proces with helping the beginning, you know, finding the right
ideas, putting the projects together.
The middle, you know keeping them going through the milestones.
And at the end, say, you know, when is enough enough?
We cannot let it happen that what has been achieved, over the last years, will not be
continued.
It’s of no use if you only have initiatives like this for five years, because clearly
the problems that need to be solved, need longer terms before you have the real solutions.
So these are big questions.
Right, this is not a question about, you know, basic academic science.
It will be to the benefit of society, and patients in particular, where at this moment
new drugs are very badly needed.
A group like TI Pharma can actually bring the world together.
Not just the Dutch world together, but the whole of the world to make something happen.