Uniting industry and academia: Medicines Discovery Catapult

Medicines Discovery Catapult (MDC) is a Life Sciences service that reshapes drug discovery to deliver better treatments for patients. They partner with innovators across the sector, helping them turn bold scientific ideas into real-world impact.

MDC supports our Industry Alliance and is an active participant in our Industry Forums. Here, Sara Imariso, Strategy Leader, Neuroscience, and Ekta Patel, Senior Partnership Manager, Neuroscience, tell us more about the work they do at MDC and how it could help shape future collaborations. 

Drug discovery and partnerships

MDC supports drug discovery companies at every step, from early research through to commercialisation, by providing access to world-class science, laboratories, technologies, and expertise.

Evolving the relationship

In mental health research, the relationship between industry and academia is evolving. It is becoming increasingly apparent that many of the field’s complex challenges can only be addressed through partnership. Academia brings deep scientific expertise, novel ideas, and a strong understanding of disease biology, while industry contributes experience in drug discovery and development, translational research, regulatory pathways, and ultimately brings innovations to patients.

In mental health particularly, there is a consensus that no single organisation can solve psychiatric drug discovery challenges alone. A successful research programme requires multidisciplinary collaboration across academia, industry, people with lived experience, charities, funders and regulatory bodies.

We are now seeing an emphasis on collaboration earlier in the research process. 

Engaging industry partners at an early stage helps researchers understand the translational pathway, identify potential barriers to development and ensure that research programmes are designed with future patient impact in mind.

Early dialogue can help shape research questions, align expectations and increase the likelihood that promising discoveries progress beyond the laboratory. 

Collaboration benefits and considerations

The Industry Alliance 

The Industry Alliance provides a valuable mechanism for bringing researchers together with Industry Partners and other key stakeholders. It creates a forum for dialogue helping to ensure that research remains connected to real-world needs. 

For MDC, the Industry Alliance is particularly valuable because it helps us understand evolving Industry priorities and provides an opportunity to share perspectives across the ecosystem. 

This allows us to ensure that the scientific activities within the Mental Health Platform and Health Data Research’s DATAMIND remain relevant to the wider translational and innovation landscape.

The Industry Alliance provides a mechanism through which MDC can apply this experience for the benefit of the wider ecosystem. We see an important role in helping ensure that high-quality, potentially impactful science is visible to the right stakeholders, whether they are industry partners, investors or translational organisations. The relationship is bidirectional; we can help communicate industry needs and priorities back into the research community, supporting researchers to consider translational pathways earlier and maximise the potential impact of their work.

Existing collaborations

MDC’s Psychiatry Consortium is an excellent example of the value of industry-academia collaboration. The Consortium was established to address the significant unmet need in psychiatric drug discovery by bringing together academic researchers, pharmaceutical companies, charities and translational experts to identify and validate novel drug targets for mental health conditions. 

Over the four-year term, the Psychiatry Consortium funded three collaborative projects, including investigating KALRN as a novel target for schizophrenia, NEGR1 as a novel target for depression and GALR3 as a novel target for postpartum depression. Through the Consortium model, researchers were able to access funding, industry expertise and a broader drug discovery framework to help progress the research beyond what might have been possible through an academic project alone.

The benefits extended beyond academia. Industry partners gained visibility of a diverse range of high-quality studies, emerging scientific approaches and leading research groups working across the mental health translational research landscape. This provided valuable insight into evolving areas of science and created opportunities to engage with innovative research at an earlier stage.

The key to a successful collaboration is creating opportunities for open dialogue. 

Bringing researchers and industry together early allows both sides to understand each other’s priorities and set expectations, helping to build trust and establish shared objectives from the outset.