On the Cutting Edge

Corey Goodman of Pfizer talks about his role in translating biomedical discoveries into new medicines.

Last October, Corey Goodman stepped down as CEO of the biotech company Renovis, which he co-founded, to take up a new position: President of Pfizer’s Biotherapeutics and Bioinnovation Center (BBC). Joining one of the world’s biggest pharmaceutical companies might seem like an interesting career choice for a man who is used to being his own boss, but Goodman is enthusiastic about the opportunities his new role provides.

“I lead a very new and entrepreneurial division, building on the biotherapeutics capabilities that we have today, as well as looking at bioinnovation and new technologies for future therapeutics. My role is to bring in the latest technologies and capabilities so that they become key future drivers of our portfolio in treating major medical needs.”

The BBC aims to complement Pfizer’s existing drug discovery and development programs by providing a distinct enterprise charged with discovering and bringing in new biotherapeutics. Scientists at the center use cutting-edge technologies to bridge the gap between basic research and drug discovery.

Goodman goes on to explain that his goal is to make Pfizer a leader in biotherapeutics and in the key technologies that continue to emerge from the biology revolution. “If you go back to the 1970s, when the technologies of recombinant DNA first emerged, there was a whole revolution out of which came methods for using antibodies and proteins as therapeutics, including small parts of proteins as peptides – that’s what triggered the beginning of the biotechnology industry.

The area of biotherapeutics has now emerged as a major part of the drug industry throughout the world, and according to Goodman, it’s here to stay – in fact, it’s going to grow.

“It’s a matter of different but complementary approaches,” Goodman says. “Biologics will complement small molecules. In the coming years, biotherapeutics are likely to be as much as 25 percent of the drug market –­ and if we’re going to be the number one pharmaceutical industry leader, we should be a leader in that area as well .”

New technologies
The company is tackling innovation on many fronts. On the one hand, they are working with existing technologies, such as monoclonal antibodies. One of Goodman’s first goals was to make Pfizer a leader in this area, by using the recently acquired biotech company Rinat. As Goodman explains, “The idea is to have Rinat as our antibody hub working with our different therapeutic areas and feeding those antibodies and technologies throughout the Pfizer organization.

“We’re also looking at the next technology that’s coming along, which is the ability to take peptides and give them properties that will make them more long-lasting as better therapeutics. Many peptides in your body might have a half-life of only a few hours at most. We want to be able to have peptides that could be given as a therapeutic once a day or once a week or perhaps once a month, by attaching them to a neutral antibody scaffold.

Pfizer recently acquired a biotech company, CovX, which is now part of the BBC. “CovX provides us with cutting-edge technologies to turn peptides and other small biologics into long-lasting therapeutics,” Goodman says. “We see the CovX technology as having a major future in Pfizer’s biotherapeutic pipeline.

“Human antibodies, when injected into a human, will often last for days or weeks, even for months. They have great properties in terms of circulating in the bloodstream, getting access to tissues, and not getting metabolized and removed from the body because, of course, you have antibodies in your own body.

“Peptides have a very fast turnover. One in particular that we and many others are very excited about for diabetes is called GLP-1. GLP-1 in the body has a half-life of five minutes. If you are diabetic, GLP-1 helps regulate your insulin and helps reduce the debilitating effects of diabetes, but you’re not going to want to inject GLP-1 into yourself every five minutes.”

The question, according to Goodman is how can you keep GLP-1 around longer so that it doesn’t get metabolized? He says the idea is to take a human antibody that is otherwise neutral, that won’t bind to any particular protein in your body; but in its binding pocket, it’s been engineered in a special way so that using a small molecule organic linker, a peptide can be attached so it’s hanging out right at the end of that binding site.

“Suddenly, what we’ve done is taken an antibody with all of its properties that will last for days or weeks in the body, and we’ve transformed its binding site into now holding a peptide with all the specificity that a peptide has in binding to its receptor. It’s a beautiful technology. It originated from Carlos Barbas and Richard Lerner at the Scripps Institute, and it’s ideal because it allows us to take natural peptides from the human body and give them back as therapeutics and have them last with the pharmacodynamics of a human antibody.”

Great hopes
Goodman proudly explains that in the last few months, the scientists at CovX have been developing an antibody that, instead of having two binding sites each displaying the same peptides, will display two different peptides. “That has great possibilities for the future, in areas like diabetes, obesity and oncology – we’re very excited about it. If I had to predict, my prediction would be that 10 years from now, there will be a significant number of drugs being sold and a significant part of Pfizer’s portfolio that will be based on the CovX technology. It has amazing potential.”

CovX has generated three early stage compounds: one for diabetes and two for cancer. Of the three, two are in phase I, and one is still in pre-clinical development and won’t enter phase I until later this year. Goodman says they all have the potential to progress from phase I to phase II in the next couple of years.

Pfizer is also looking at technologies that are even further off in the future. The Research and Technology Center (RTC) is focused on new, highly promising therapeutic technologies using RNA interference, or RNAi technologies. The company is developing regenerative medicine technologies, based on stem cell therapies, and other technologies that are coming out of the academic and the biotech world. “We survey all of these new technologies and ask where we believe the next emerging technology for human therapeutics is going to come from – the one that might be 25 percent of the therapeutic drug market in 10 or 15 years’ time. It’s quite a challenge, but it’s also a lot of fun.”

Scientists at the BBC collaborate closely with Pfizer Global Research and Development (PGRD), though they take care not to duplicate capabilities that already exist. “On the one hand, we’re independent, yet on the other hand, we’re very interdependent. We don’t want to reinvent things that they’re great at. We want to be a hybrid and take advantage of their strengths, and at the same time take advantage of the biotech model based on small, nimble, entrepreneurial units, and we’ve got a great operating plan for doing that.

“For example, PGRD has depth of knowledge in many therapeutic areas. We don’t need to duplicate that. If they have deep knowledge of animal models or clinical development, then we want to learn from them and work with them. They also have great capabilities in pharmaceutical science, making proteins and scaling them up for pre-clinical development and for clinical development, and we also want to build on that.

“Our philosophy is that where the resources and scale of PGRD are going to be helpful to us, we will collaborate with them, and where we think the small entrepreneurial model is going to be best for certain kinds of technology development and certain kinds of research discovery and pre-clinical development, then we’re going to work with that model. Our goal is to make the BBC, and its relationship with PGRD, represent the best of both worlds.”

Individualized treatment
There has been much talk about the emergence of genome-based or personalized medicine, and what this will mean for the pharmaceutical industry. Goodman certainly isn’t intimidated by the thought of it. “For society, I think it’s terrific. It’s a trend that is coming, and pharmaceutical and major biotech companies will have to adjust and embrace it.

“We all know that some drugs, whether they’re for diabetes or for cancer or inflammation, work for certain people, and many times they don’t give the same sort of efficacy for other people. With personalized medicine and the ability to look at people’s genomes, at their particular genes and at other aspects of their human biology, it should be possible to better predict which of those drugs will work.

“Genentech was in the first wave with Herceptin to show that this works not only for patients, but also for the companies and the marketplace. Ten years from now, more and more drugs will be coming onto the market with personalized medicine tests to determine exactly which population of cancer patients or which population of arthritis patients, for example, a particular drug will work best for.

“This will mean we can focus on those patients, because they have a much better chance of getting significant, major improvements. I think it’s a win-win for society and for the industry, and it’s a trend that we will see more and more in the next few years.”

It’s certainly something that can’t be ignored, but can a company make good profits that way? Goodman points again to Genentech and Herceptin as an example that it clearly works. “Had they done that clinical trial for all breast cancer patients, the trial may not have worked. Because they did it for a specific subset of patients for which they had a molecular marker to say that the drug was likely to work, the trial was successful, the drug made it to the marketplace, and it’s a big winner. It could be that in the future, we’ll find that many drugs that failed in the past actually do work, or would have worked, if we had been able to target a very specific subset of patients for which they were best-suited.”

Looking forward
According to Goodman, the future looks very promising. The company will continue to drive an increasing number of biotherapeutic drug candidates into the clinic and then hand them off to PGRD for phase III trials, and then Pfizer will take them into the marketplace. He sees Pfizer experiencing a major increase in its biotherapeutics pipeline, and within five years he sees a big jump in the market share for biotherapeutics from Pfizer’s commercial organization.

The second goal is to continue to build up these new technologies for the future. “In addition to antibodies and CovX bodies, there are other technologies coming along. We can’t afford to invest in all of them. One of our roles is to look at each emerging technology as it comes out of academia, as it comes out of the biotech world, and to ask which ones are the best ones to invest in, which ones will be major players in the therapeutic marketplace, and how should Pfizer invest to become a leader in those areas.

“Over the next five years, I believe we’ll see several of these technologies, including RNAi and stem cells, emerge as being ripe for development for a whole new generation of therapeutics.”

About Dr. Corey Goodman
Dr. Corey Goodman is President of Pfizer’s Biotherapeutics and Bioinnovation Center. He oversees this newly established entrepreneurial center, which is focused on translating biomedical discoveries into new medicines, as well as looking at bioinnovation and new technologies for future therapeutics. Goodman was a Professor at Stanford University and U.C. Berkeley for over two decades, and is currently Adjunct Professor at U.C. Berkeley. He has advised numerous biotechnology companies and co-founded two of them.