BOSTON – The head of Pfizer Inc.'s Center for Therapeutic Innovation (CTI) called Boston "a wildly synergistic hotbed" for new ideas, during a panel on the final day of EBD Group's BioPharm America, designed to hook up would-be partners for talks around drug development deals.

Leigh Zawel joined upper-level personnel from Astrazeneca plc, Johnson & Johnson and Merck & Co. Inc. for a discussion of the region's allure, and how the growing cluster of research coincides with big pharma's interests.

"We're starting to look much earlier," Zawel said, hailing the nascent science that abounds in Boston via labs associated with universities and hospitals. "They've got a lot of options in front of them," he noted – a situation much different from not so long ago.

Not only are pharma firms signing partners in the first stages of research, but they are also providing more disclosure about what's going on internally, so that would-be collaborators know the best prospects to offer up, the panel said.

Moderating the discussion was Johannes Fruehauf, founder and president of Labcentral in Cambridge, Mass., an 8,000-square-foot facility in the Kendall Square region, with laboratory and office space available to fledgling life science firms. Labcentral houses 26 start-ups with an average of four to five employees each.

"It's a fairly new concept, [which does] away with the worry of intellectual property protection that traditionally had start-up companies pigeonholed in one location, working by themselves," Fruehauf said. "We saw that, and knew how productive other industries [such as information technology] have used the concept of co-working."

Labcentral's companies have the benefits of sharing space with others similarly positioned, including "mind-share and peer learnings," without stepping on each other's toes, Fruehauf said.

In Massachusetts, biotech and pharma employment – excluding academic institutions and hospitals – have seen job growth of 42 percent over the last 10 years, compared with growth of only 4 percent in other sectors, Fruehauf said. Boston is "by far" the recipient of the most funding from the NIH, with the five largest NIH grantees located in the city. "Big pharma is starting to pay attention," he said.

Zawel came aboard Pfizer's CTI, "a paradigm-bending initiative," about a year ago, after working at Novartis AG, Sanofi SA and Merck. "One of the real challenges in biotech and pharma is that everyone's working on the same targets, and it's really hard to get a return on your investment if you're not first or second to market," he said, adding that Pfizer wanted to "mine the early academic space to get at these opportunities."

The firm set up a series of hybrid drug discovery laboratories, part industry and part academia. "Boston was an obvious choice," Zawel said, thanks to the plentiful NIH funding, collected because the city is "rich with talent in the biomedical sciences. It was sort of a no-brainer."

Robert Urban, head of Johnson & Johnson Innovation LLC, said his company has been working in the same vein for about two years. Other J&J centers are located in Menlo Park, Calif., London and Shanghai. "We have a group of our top technical people deposited in places around the world with all the competence necessary to be able to work much more closely than we have in the past" with scientists breaking new ground, he said.

"It was clear to J&J some time ago that they needed to find a way to become more involved in what was going on in the Boston area," Urban said, "where the industry is unveiling itself in new ways."

Urban credited the "human currency" and "high collision frequency" in Boston for upping the scientific ante over most other regions. "It's all about people who know and trust each other," he said, and J&J's efforts are "not about talking about it. We're willing to do almost anything together," in order to create "breathtaking moments in science," he said – though the science does need to be well explored first.

The panel agreed that a major benefit of strong R&D internally is the ability to select wisely from opportunities that make themselves known outside. "Everything you look at, when you don't understand it, looks beautiful," Urban said.

FEDS: WORRY ABOUT LITTLE GUYS

Benjamin Thorner, head of business development (BD) and licensing for the Boston Innovation Hub for Merck Research Laboratories, started as a private-practice deals lawyer for small biotechs, and then spent six years with Thousand Oaks, Calif.-based Amgen Inc., first in the legal department and later in BD.

Next, at Novartis, Thorner stayed in touch with colleagues at Amgen, including Roger Perlmutter, formerly head of R&D, who returned to Merck (whence he had come) as head of R&D about 18 months ago, with "a mandate to reinvent what Merck is doing" in that department, Thorner said. Merck also has a venture capital arm.

The pharma giant maintains a $7.5 billion R&D budget, mostly focused on internal efforts, but Perlmutter has a "very clear sense that no matter how good any big pharma R&D organization is, we're sort of a drop in the bucket" compared to the rest of the world, Thorner said. Merck identified Boston and San Francisco as the key centers in North America, where the firm would seek licensing opportunities and collaborations – "no easy feat," Thorner added. "There's still a limit to how early is doable."

Mature relationships "often start with person-to-person connections," he said, "so we're trying very hard to get scientists to actually spend a chunk of time outside the laboratory, going to symposia and meetings at Harvard Medical School and at the teaching hospitals in our neighborhood as well as over in Cambridge."

Representing Astrazeneca – also with a strong Boston presence similar to the others – was Kumar Srinivasan, vice president of partnering and alliances, who said 40 percent to 50 percent of programs have "some kind of external component, but there's no metric" that dictates the number. "We have a dedicated group focused on establishing academic relationships, so they have a single point of contact," Srinivasan said.

Fruehauf, citing the political changes that have partly made Boston's boom possible, asked if more could be done to boost the sector locally. Most of the panel agreed on the need for tax incentives or other measures to lower the cost of property. On a wider scale, said J&J's Urban, federal decision-makers should "worry less about us, the big companies, and more about the little companies we depend on."

The three-day Biopharm America meeting, which drew about 850 attendees, ended Wednesday.