The Company You Keep: Pfizer Partners for Success

Great partnerships lead to powerful results. Take, for example, the collaboration that gave the world the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine. Both organizations used their innovative scientific and manufacturing know-how and scale to develop a vaccine against the deadly pandemic to the world with unprecedented speed.

The partnership was just one of many that Pfizer leaders have pursued in recent years. The company collaborates with organizations to advance bold scientific ideas, capabilities and technologies that bring treatments to patients in need.

Pfizer partners with a wide array of innovators, from biopharmaceutical companies pushing the frontier of cancer therapy research to artificial intelligence companies that are discovering novel ways to create new medicines.

These are some of the notable partnerships in recent years.

In July 2021, Pfizer announced a global collaboration agreement with  Arvinas, a New Haven, Conn.-based biopharmaceutical company. Building on Pfizer’s established leadership position in developing innovative breast cancer treatments, the two organizations will develop ARV-471, a novel endocrine therapy that is currently in Phase 2 clinical trials and has shown early potential as a best-in-class therapy for the treatment of estrogen receptor positive (ER+) breast cancer, the most common breast cancer subtype.¹

“This collaboration has the potential to be transformational, as it combines our leadership in targeted protein degradation with Pfizer’s global capabilities and deep expertise in breast cancer,” said Arvinas CEO John Houston.

Pfizer’s has strengthened its oncology business, one of its six primary therapeutic areas, though strategic alliances and acquisitions. For example, in 2019, the company acquired Array Biopharma, an innovative company with an impressive track record of successfully discovering and developing innovative small-molecules and targeted cancer therapies.² With the acquisition of Array, Pfizer has established a strong franchise in colorectal cancer (CRC), the third most common type of cancer worldwide.

In March, the artificial intelligence startup Iktos announced it would be collaborating with Pfizer to discover the small molecules that are the foundations for many new medicines.³

Iktos, founded in 2016, has applied artificial intelligence solutions to research around medicinal chemistry and new drug design. The partnership could aid drug discovery by using AI to create new compounds rather than the traditional method of screening huge libraries for possible combinations.

“By combining [Pfizer’s] drug discovery expertise with our algorithmic and data science know-how and experience derived from the many collaborations we have established to date, we believe that the promise of AI to dramatically improve drug discovery will have a better chance to be realized and impact therapeutic development,” said Yann Gaston-Mathé, Co-founder and CEO of Iktos.

Pfizer and other leading biopharmaceutical companies announced in early 2021 that they had created a nonprofit to enable real-time exchange with regulators, stored safely in the cloud. The result is Accumulus Synergy, which will benefit regulators in their review by making it easier to run analyses to address review questions. This will streamline the regulatory process and could ultimately benefit patients by bringing life-saving medicines to them faster than ever before.

“This project reflects the importance of collaboration among stakeholders to improve pharmaceutical development, with the potential to enable faster and more efficient exchange of information and data,” said Mikael Dolsten, Pfizer’s Chief Scientific Officer and President, Worldwide Research, Development and Medical.⁴