Intellectual Property Statement for Cancer Project

This project is sponsored by several organisations, each contributing differently. The National Foundation for Cancer Research (NFCR) provides research funding to Professor Graham Richards’ group at Oxford University, which develops and screens the drug candidate molecules: Treweren Consultants Ltd contributes the processing software, and contracts with United Devices, Inc. to place the software in a distributed computing environment: United Devices developed the UD Agent, the distributing computing technology, and contracts with the PC owners for the use of their idle computing time: Intel Corporation has provided funding and marketing support to assist in the launch of the project. The hope is that a combination of the above efforts will help identify the most promising drug candidates for the treatment of cancer. This is the very first step in what would be a lengthy drug development process if a drug is to be placed on the market for the benefit of patients.

As between the sponsoring organisations, the results of the study will be the sole and exclusive property of Oxford University. Oxford will initiate and control the filing of any patent applications. Oxford has granted NFCR an exclusive first option to negotiate in good faith a royalty-bearing licence over the results for further drug development. Any royalties NFCR receives from any licensing will be granted back to Oxford University as research funding. Oxford reserves a royalty-free, non-exclusive licence to use the intellectual property internally, in connection with Oxford’s teaching, research and public service mission.

After taking account of any steps necessary to preserve patentability, Professor Richards’ research group, the project co-ordinator, will publish the results. This group originally designed the project and is currently orchestrating the study. Scientific interpretation of the results will take some time. Results and scientific findings will be published in the usual manner through a peer-reviewed process. It is hard to tell what will be published with the research still underway; but a mixture of technical and results papers are envisaged over the next 2–3 years. At a minimum, United Devices, the University of Oxford and NFCR will post results and developments on their respective Web sites.

Within 6–12 months of the completion of the calculations, Professor Richards’ research group hopes to identify a short, prioritised list of the molecules which the research has predicted will bind to the protein.

At that time Oxford and NFCR will enlist the most appropriate collaborators to help offset the very expensive task of making the estimated 160,000 derivatives of the molecules which would be required for testing. Then any promising drug candidate molecules will be passed along to other groups, either academic research groups or pharmaceutical/biotech companies, for biological testing and/or clinical trials. Recent studies [e.g. J Pharm Sci 89, 145-184 (2000)] indicate that only 5% of molecules which go into clinical trials are eventually marketed as drugs.

Prepared by Oxford University and agreed by the other sponsoring organisations

added 8 May 2001

Figure. A view of the Linux cluster in Professor Richards' and Dr. Guy Grant's research group. The Linux cluster was in part funded by the NFCR and shall be used to look at the results from the cancer screening project. There are currently 45 nodes in the cluster running PBS queuing software to control the computational calculations.