Pfizer Inc. scientists from Groton will be collaborating with top university researchers around the country to develop drugs that target diabetes and obesity, the company announced Friday.

Pfizer is funding a three-year, $14 million Insulin Resistance Pathway Project in conjunction with Caltech, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of Massachusetts and the University of California at Santa Barbara. The partners, who will be joined by Entelos, a physiological modeling company, will re-examine the mechanisms behind diabetes and obesity, conditions that affect about 7 percent of the U.S. population, or some 21 million people.

”We are very fortunate to be working with such a prestigious team,” said C. Preston Hensley, who will oversee the project for Pfizer.

Hensley said scientists from Pfizer labs in Groton, where the company's diabetes and obesity efforts are centralized, as well as from Pfizer Research Technology Center in Cambridge, Mass., will work directly with the academic research teams.

”What is most exciting and unique about this effort is that we are combining distinct approaches to transform our picture of what happens inside the cell in response to insulin,” said Robert Garofalo, lead Pfizer scientist on the project.

Garofalo, in a phone interview, said 12 to 15 people at the Groton research site will be spending at least part of their time on the project, with about the same number involved at Pfizer's site in Cambridge.

The project's first phase will involve data collection and analysis of the way fat cells operate. It is being led by Frank Doyle, a professor of chemical engineering at Caltech.

Pfizer scientists, who will work both in Groton and directly at the university research labs, will prepare the fat cells to be used in the project.

”All the different data generated we will weave together to get a global picture,” Garofalo said.

He said no collaboration of this scope between academia and a pharmaceutical company -- looking at the basic nature of a disease -- has ever been attempted before.

”The IRP Project is a new paradigm in two respects,” Doyle said in a statement.“First, its methodology is a true departure from the way fundamental research in human disease has been done and then applied to the development of new therapies in the past. Second, this consortium also represents a sea change in how industry and academia collaborate in research and product development in the pharmaceutical area.”

An agreement allows academic partners to publish or patent any discoveries in basic biology.

”All we ask for is the right to license,” said Garofalo.

If the first phase of the project goes well, the partners plan an extension of the studies into other insulin-sensitive parts of the body.

Pfizer's drug pipeline includes seven compounds in various stages of development.

”We are hopeful that the research gathered from this consortium will provide new targets for this major unmet medical need and, ultimately, provide patients with new, better ways to treat these conditions,” according to a statement from Corey Goodman, president of Pfizer's new Biotherapeutics and Bioinnovation division, based in La Jolla, Calif.

l.howard@theday.com