As part of Cancer Research UK, and with a recently established alliance management team, what has been your experience building it up? What difficulties or challenges have you encountered on the way?

I feel like it has been a very positive change establishing the Strategic Alliance team. We are still in the process of building the team, including recruiting vacant roles, but already I can see the benefits of pooling our knowledge and experience, and working on establishing best practice together with our key stakeholders within CRUK’s Therapeutic Discovery Laboratories. The team currently focuses on our drug discovery alliances, so one challenge for the future is how we share our learnings and experiences more broadly across CRUK to the benefit of other alliance-type relationships of different types that are managed within the wider charity. It is also critical to work hard to make sure we do not become siloed as a team, through establishing a close interface with the Business Development and Transactions team who will lead in delivering new alliance deals, as well as our Opportunity Sourcing and Translation team, who are critical in ensuring a flow of exciting new drug discovery targets into existing alliances. 

The Alliance Management Department’s structure can vary from company to company. Some companies opt for a more centralized model while others prefer to have alliance managers scattered all along the enterprise. What is your current structure? Do you think that you are moving towards an efficient cluster of alliance managers?

Our recent restructure of the Commercial Partnerships team has clustered alliance management within the new Strategic Alliances team, whereas previously alliance managers were scattered across the whole Commercial Partnerships team, and would have also been undertaking other business tasks in addition to alliance management. It’s early days but so far I remain convinced that establishing this new focussed team is key to taking a more strategic approach to the successful delivery of our major alliance partnerships. 

As a charity in cancer research, what are you looking for when partnering with the Pharma industry? Do you think your objectives and challenges greatly differ from those of the industry?

Broadly we share the same objective of seeking to discover and develop new therapeutics that can serve cancer patients of unmet need – so our overall drivers are generally well aligned. That said, we seek partners who understand the benefits of working closely with academic scientists, can support their publication ambitions, and are willing to get into novel, unexplored (and therefore risky) areas of biology. 

Do you have partnerships with other charities? What are you expecting to obtain from these type of alliances?

We are currently running a major alliance in immuno-oncology with the UK medical charity LifeArc, which combines our resources, capabilities in small molecule and antibody discovery, and complementary scientific networks. The alliance has been running for 2 years, and is prosecuting a portfolio of target validation and drug discovery projects identified from the academic community. We have ambitious plans to grow the alliance substantially over the coming year and hope to be able to share more about that at the conference. 

What would you like to achieve by attending the 9th Annual Strategic Alliance Management for Pharma?

I am looking forward to sharing more information on CRUK’s existing alliance partnerships and strategy, as well as meeting and networking with the growing community focussed on alliance management.