Philosophy
Key Points
- Focus: The largest international non-profit institute dedicated to understanding and controlling cancer
- Flexible: The international structure of the Institute allows access to scientific, clinical and technological resources where-ever they may be found in the world, and reliable funding from the Institute's endowment gives LICR investigators the freedom to tackle speculative, long-term cancer research challenges
- Full Spectrum: The Institute takes responsibility for protecting the intellectual property of its laboratory discoveries, and identifying and characterizing their diagnostic and/or therapeutic utilities by sponsoring and conducting its own early-phase clinical trials.
The prospects for controlling cancer will only improve through an ongoing commitment to innovative basic and clinical research. Recognizing this, the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research Ltd (LICR) engages leading scientists and clinicians in an integrated laboratory and clinical research effort to understand and confront the global challenge of cancer.
Substantially all research financed by LICR is carried out by the Institute’s own appointed research staff or through laboratory and clinical collaborations involving LICR staff and external investigators around the world.
LICR is distinguishable from other cancer research institutes, not only by its size and global reach, but also by its reliable, long-term funding perspective. A limitation of the academic medical research—in which funding is given to individual investigators by government agencies and not the investigator’s academic institution—is that research projects are too frequently fragmented, overlapping, and lacking in strategic coordination. Research also becomes predominantly defined by what can be achieved in a single laboratory within a funding cycle of, typically, three years. In contrast, LICR funds over 70% of the cost of the research that it conducts; support that is drawn from the Institute’s endowment and from donations. This reliable and flexible funding model gives LICR investigators the freedom to tackle speculative, long-term research, and encourages and enables multidisciplinary teams of investigators to tackle larger, more complex cancer challenges.
The protection and licensing of intellectual property (IP) generated by research discoveries are fundamental to LICR’s commitment to translate its discoveries into applications for human benefit. Without a proprietary position, for-profit companies will not invest in the clinical development, manufacture, distribution, marketing and sales required to translate LICR discoveries into new therapies for cancer patients. Accordingly, LICR patents its discoveries such that its IP is managed for public service; the IP is made freely-available to the academic research community, and a financial return can be expected for the company that invests in the therapy’s successful development and, potentially, for LICR to fund further research efforts.
LICR takes responsibility for the entire discovery continuum, from the laboratory to the clinic. Many universities and academic research institutes lack the expertise, infrastructure and resources to introduce their laboratory discoveries into the clinic. To bridge that divide they turn their work product over to companies that engage in drug development, a process driven by primarily commercial considerations: time to product launch and share of market captured. Between the worlds of laboratory discovery and therapeutic utility, there is a missing link that interrupts the efficient exploration of knowledge for human benefit. That missing link is clinical research. LICR is convinced that the same systematic, investigative rigor that yielded the laboratory discovery in the first place should be applied in early-phase clinic trials to assess a discovery’s therapeutic potential. The Institute has, therefore, committed the resources and marshaled the capabilities that allow it to evaluate its promising basic discoveries in first-in-man clinical studies.
