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‘Stealth’ corporate innovation: an emerging threat for therapeutic drug development

An Author Correction to this article was published on 11 October 2019

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Therapeutic innovations of potentially great clinical impact should embrace the overarching values of research accountability, data transparency and validation through the scientific peer-review process.

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Fig. 1: Market valuation of complement-related drug–development companies versus research output (peer-reviewed publications of company-sponsored research) that validates their complement-related technology or drug candidate.

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  • 11 October 2019

    An amendment to this paper has been published and can be accessed via a link at the top of the paper.

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Authors and Affiliations

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Correspondence to John D. Lambris.

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Competing interests

A.M.B. has provided paid consulting services to Zealand Pharma. B.V.G. collaborates with and has received research materials from SomaLogic and Roche Pharma and has also provided paid consulting services for ClearView Health Care Partners and 1776 Health Care. B.G. is the holder of a US patent for a monoclonal antibody for the treatment of angioedema and a patent for monoclonal antibodies to both C1q and C1qRs for the treatment of various types of cancer and has consulted for Diaccurate-Pasteur and Orion Pharma but has never received research support from any pharmaceutical company. P.G. has collaborated with and has received research funding and/or research materials from Genmab and Merus. G.H. is an inventor on patents or patent applications that describe the use of complement inhibitors for therapeutic purposes in periodontitis, some of which are being developed by Amyndas Pharmaceuticals. V.M.H. is a co-founder of Taligen Therapeutics and AdMIRx, receives Taligen-related licensing royalties from Alexion, has equity interest in and consulting income from AdMIRx, and is a recent or current consultant in non-complement areas to Janssen Research and Development, Amgen, Celgene, BMS and Trios. M.H.-L. holds a patent on compositions of matter and methods for the diagnosis and treatment of sepsis by C5a inhibitory strategies licensed to InflaRx. T.K. has received consultant fees and honoraria for lectures from Alexion. T.E.M. has received consultant fees from Ra Pharmaceuticals, SVAR Life Science and Alexion Pharmaceuticals. R.A.M. has received research funding from Alexion (the manufacturer of Soliris-Eculizumab) and Shire ViroPharma, has served as a paid consultant for Alexion, Shire ViroPharma and CSL Behring, has received travel honoraria from Alexion and Shire ViroPharma, has served on advisory boards for Genentech/Roche, True North/iPerian, Novartis and Hansa Medical, and received consulting fees from OrbidMed, GuidePoint Global, Sucampo, Astellas, and Shire and research grants from Immune Tolerance Network, ViroPharma, Hansa and Alexion. B.P.M. has received research support from GSK and served as an advisor for GSK, Roche, Alexion and Ra Pharma. B.N. is a shareholder and consultant in Tikomed and iCoat Medical. R.P. is the inventor on patents that describe the use of complement-related proteins for cancer diagnosis and has received consultant fees from Amadix and research funding from Dompé. D.R. is the inventor on patents or patent applications that describe the use of complement inhibitors for therapeutic purposes, some of which are developed by Amyndas Pharmaceuticals, and has provided paid consulting services to Roche Pharma. A.M.R. has received research support from Alexion Pharmaceuticals, Novartis, Alnylam and Ra Pharma and lecture fees from Alexion, Novartis, Pfizer and Apellis, and served as member of advisory–investigator boards for Alexion, Roche, Achillion, Novartis, Apellis and Samsung, and as a consultant for Amyndas. R.P.T. has collaborated with and received research funding and research materials from Genmab. J.D.L. is the founder of Amyndas Pharmaceuticals, which is developing complement inhibitors for therapeutic purposes, is the inventor of patents or patent applications that describe the use of complement inhibitors for therapeutic purposes, some of which are being developed by Amyndas Pharmaceuticals, is the inventor of the compstatin technology licensed to Apellis Pharmaceuticals (4(1MeW)7W/POT-4/APL-1 and PEGylated derivatives such as APL-2/pegcetacoplan), and has provided paid consulting services to Achillion, Ra Pharma, Viropharma, Sanofi, Shire, LipimetiX and Baxter.

Supplementary information

Supplementary Dataset 1

Companies Citations ScopusAnalysis 080619

Supplementary Dataset 2

Market caps and research output stealth paper 070319

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Mastellos, D.C., Blom, A.M., Connolly, E.S. et al. ‘Stealth’ corporate innovation: an emerging threat for therapeutic drug development. Nat Immunol 20, 1409–1413 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41590-019-0503-1

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