At the interface between scientific research and patient care lie pharmaceutical companies with their efforts toward drug discovery. Despite the push for clinicians to ‘translate’ the latest research findings into new applications for their patients, few of them have direct experience with drug discovery. Instead, the research options for academic clinicians tend to split into two tracks, either basic research or patient care, with few training opportunities to provide exposure to drug discovery or patient-based clinical trials.
The Wellcome Trust wants to encourage the movement of clinicians into this space by offering training programs to give them experience directly with pharmaceutics. ‘The big question we are faced with is how to train clinicians within the broad field of translational medicine so that they have the skills to become effective translationists. We feel that to do this, we need to leverage the expertise that exists in the university sector with the expertise in the pharma sector,’ explains Dr John Williams, who coordinates the Wellcome Trust Translational Medicine and Therapeutics programs.
‘The interface between pharma and academia is becoming increasingly important. The R&D (research and development) models in pharma are changing to allow them to work more closely with academic partners. We need to train a cadre of bright young clinicians to have the skills, the right kind of awareness and, ultimately, the scientific ideas to cross this interface,’ says Dr Williams. The unique training approach of these fellowships exposes clinicians to research on disease processes, with a focus on how the information might be used to change patient diagnostics or treatment. The Wellcome Trust hopes to strategically provide a subset of clinicians with cooperative understanding of disease physiology and medicine, where they might coordinate medical care with scientific discovery.
‘In the UK, and elsewhere, there is a real decline in the number of people who are able to carry out high-quality patient-based research. These programs establish an environment where bright young clinicians might be drawn, not into the more typical route of molecular biology research, but to research questions that focus on patient-based studies,’ says Dr Williams.
The programs are partnerships between academic institutions and pharmaceutical companies, including: GlaxoSmithKline, Wyeth Research, Roche, AstraZeneca, Sanofi-Aventis, Sirtris Pharmaceuticals and PTC Therapeutics. Academic clinicians, including specialists, can apply to programs through one of the four participating centers: University of Cambridge, University of Newcastle, Imperial College London and the Scottish Consortium. More information about these fellowships that are available from the Wellcome Trust can be found through the websites for the individual centers, or together with information about biomedical science funding from the Wellcome Trust at www.wellcome.ac.uk.
