As part of a newly announced collaboration with non-profit scientific institutes and high-tech companies, British-Swedish drugmaker AstraZeneca and its global biologics research and development arm, MedImmune, plan to focus corporate drug R&D more closely on genomics in future. At the forefront of the initiative is a 10-year project in which the drugmaker will collaborate with privately owned Human Longevity, the California, USA-based company founded by genomics pioneer Craig Venter, as well as the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute in Cambridge, UK, and the Helsinki, Finland-based Institute of Molecular Medicine.

Additionally, at its corporate headquarters in Cambridge, AstraZeneca will establish an in-house Centre for Genomics Research, which will develop what it termed “a bespoke database” comprising genome sequences from samples donated by patients in its clinical trials together with associated clinical and drug response data.

Menelas Pangalos, executive vice president, Innovative Medicines & Early Development, said the company will leverage information from up to 2 million genome sequences, including over 500,000 from its own clinical trials, to drive drug discovery and development across all therapeutic areas. The drugmaker said it believes that embedding genomics across its research and development platforms will deliver novel insights into the biology of diseases, enable the identification of new targets for medicine, support selection of patients for clinical trials and allow patients to be matched with treatments more likely to benefit them.

“Genomics will be fundamental to our laboratory research, our clinical trials and the launch of our medicines for patients,” Pangolos said.

With Human Longevity, AstraZeneca aims to share up to 500,000 DNA samples donated voluntarily by patients, from which the US firm will sequence full genomes and deploy its state-of-the-art machine learning, pattern recognition and other analytical techniques. The pharmaceutical producer will also gain access to Human Longevity’s unique database of up to 1 million integrated genomic and health records to add to its analysis.

In 2015, Human Longevity agreed a similar collaboration with Genentech, but Venter told the British newspaper Financial Times that the pact with AstraZeneca would be much more extensive that the partnership with the Roche subsidiary.

At the Sanger Institute, AstraZeneca will establish a research team led by an embedded internationally recognized genomics expert. The company will share genomic samples and associated clinical data, plus its drug development expertise across core therapy areas, and together the partners will identify new targets and biomarkers with potential use in diagnostic tests. The institute was a participant in the public Human Genome Project.

In Finland, the drugmaker and its Finnish and US partners will study genes of interest in the Finnish population, which AstraZeneca said is known to carry a higher than normal frequency of rare variants. The work also will be facilitated by Finland’s integrated health record system supported by a national bio-banking law that facilitates recall of volunteers for thorough clinical evaluation. 

In line with AstraZeneca’s “open innovation” approach to R&D, the company said its findings from all collaborations across its genomic platform will be published in peer-reviewed journals, contributing to the broader scientific understanding of the genetic influence of disease and positioning it as a key player in the global genomics research community.