Durham-based Quintiles, the world's largest clinical research organization, has added to the expanding scope of bioscience business relationships between North Carolina and Asia by signing a strategic alliance with Eisai, a global pharmaceutical company with worldwide headquarters in Tokyo but with a major U.S. facility in Research Triangle Park, near the Quintiles campus.
The pact, announced just a few days after Gov. Bev Perdue and a contingent of business and policy leaders returned home from an economic development trip to multiple Asian countries, is designed to speed six experimental Eisai cancer drugs to the marketplace. The six drug candidates target 11 kinds of solid tumors.
The companies wouldn't disclose financial terms beyond the fact that Quintiles agreed to partly pay for the clinical studies in exchange for success milestone payments.
"Quintiles and Eisai are using the power of partnerships to manage risk and enable transformation in a rapidly evolving industry where the rules are changing on all fronts," said Ron Wooten, executive vice president of Quintiles Corporate Development.
"This goes beyond the traditional boundaries of the pharma business model, offering a more nimble, modular and variable way of leveraging resources to increase the value of assets."
Hideki Hayashi, Eisai's senior vice president and chief product creation officer, called the approach "a significant business model and new strategy for development."
"We will explore multiple indications in parallel so that we can deliver our compounds as fast, widely and appropriately as possible for cancer patients' benefit."
Privately owned Quintiles employs 23,000 people in 50 countries, 1,600 of them in North Carolina.
Eisai's 10,000 employees worldwide discover, develop and markets pharmaceuticals in three main therapeutic areas--neurology, gastrointestinal disorders and oncology/critical care. Eisai's RTP facility has about 300 employees involved in pharmaceutical production and formulation research and development.