Left: Erik Lium, PhD, Senior Vice President of Mount Sinai Innovation Partners; and Steven J. Burakoff, MD, Director of The Tisch Cancer Institute at the Icahn School of Medicine
The Tisch Cancer Institute at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and three other leading U.S. academic institutions recently established a pioneering research consortium to accelerate the discovery of new treatments for cancer.
In addition, Celgene Corp., a global biopharmaceutical company, paid $50 million to enter into four public-private collaboration agreements with each member of the new consortium for the option of developing and commercializing novel cancer therapeutics arising from their efforts.
Celgene awarded $12.5 million each to Mount Sinai, The Abramson Cancer Center at the University of Pennsylvania, The Herbert Irving Comprehensive Cancer Center at Columbia University Medical Center, and the Sidney Kimmel Comprehensive Cancer Center at Johns Hopkins.
Over the next 10 years, these academic cancer centers intend to present multiple high-impact research programs to Celgene with the goal of developing new life-saving therapeutics. Subject to Celgene’s decision to opt in and license the resulting technologies, each program has the potential to be valued at hundreds of millions of dollars.
“This is a paradigm-shifting collaboration that further strengthens our innovative ecosystem,” says Bob Hugin, Executive Chairman of Celgene Corp. “We remain firmly committed to driving critical advances in cancer and believe the tremendous expertise of our collaboration partner institutions will be invaluable in identifying new therapies for cancer patients.”
The magnitude of the multi-institutional consortium and agreements will support the rapid delivery of disease-altering treatments to clinicians and ultimately benefit cancer patients, global health care systems, and society. Collectively, the four academic medical centers care for more than 30,000 new cancer patients each year and have nearly 800 faculty members involved in clinical care and basic and clinical cancer research. They are among the 69 institutions designated as Cancer Centers by the National Cancer Institute (NCI), serving as the backbone of the NCI’s research on cancer.
“We have an unprecedented opportunity to take basic cancer research all the way to drug development with one of the most creative pharmaceutical companies,” says Steven J. Burakoff, MD, Director of The Tisch Cancer Institute at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, and the Lillian and Henry M. Stratton Professor of Cancer Medicine. “These agreements are focused on basic and translational research that is conducted at academic institutions that treat a tremendous number of new cancer patients annually.”
Says Dennis S. Charney, MD, Anne and Joel Ehrenkranz Dean, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, and President for Academic Affairs, Mount Sinai Health System: “A collaboration of this kind has never been done before. The Tisch Cancer Institute and the other three participating cancer centers will work collaboratively with Celgene to advance some of their most promising research in the field of oncology to accelerate the development of essential new therapeutics.”
Erik Lium, PhD, Senior Vice President of Mount Sinai Innovation Partners, who leads Mount Sinai’s development and commercialization division, helped spearhead the collaboration agreement.
“This consortium enables the four participating institutions to leverage their synergistic and individual strengths in research and patient care to develop new treatments for cancer,” he says.
Mount Sinai’s collaboration comes at the same time the White House has announced a new National Cancer Moonshot initiative to boost research efforts in cancer. The national initiative would harness innovative scientific insights and breakthroughs that have increased in recent years.