Merck, Lilly, and Pfizer have joined forces to create new drug discovery and development methods aimed at saving time and money by reducing the failure rate of clinical trials. The three companies and PureTech Ventures LLC have invested $39 million to launch Enlight Biosciences LLC. Enlight will represent the first for-profit venture in which Merck, Lilly or Pfizer collaborates with its competitors.
   
"Merck, Lilly and Pfizer don't see competitive conflicts because they view the technologies Enlight seeks to develop, including advanced body-imaging methods, as 'pre-competitive,'" said David Steinberg, Enlight's chief executive officer.
   
"Today, drug discovery is tremendously tech-dependent, and many of the pharmaceutical companies are falling behind," said Enlight co-founder Raju Kucherlapati, a genetics professor at Harvard Medical School.
   
"If you can find the winners earlier, and lose faster with the failures, you can really improve R&D productivity," said Steven Paul, executive vice president for science and technology at Lilly. He said that 70% of industry trials fail at the Phase II stage, the level just before final human trials. That is "just too high," he said, "and that's where these technologies come into play."
   
Enlight will establish new companies that aim to exploit any new technologies created, where members have the chance to license the technology and buy shares in it. The first of these, Endra Inc., uses sound and light imaging to examine the effects of drugs on internal organs.  

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