GSK receives £5m funding from Wellcome Trust
To fund open innovation research into diseases affecting the developing world
UK pharmaceutical firm GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) has received a cash injection of £5m from the Wellcome Trust to help advance some of its early stage projects focused on finding new treatments for diseases affecting the developing world.
The Wellcome Trust’s funding will support GSK’s open approach to discovering and developing urgently needed new treatments for these regions.
The funding will push early-stage research into treatments for diseases such as TB, malaria, Leishmaniasis and sleeping sickness to the next level, as scientists from around the world will work alongside GSK’s drug discovery experts at its Open Lab facility in Tres Cantos, Madrid, Spain, with the aim of developing two high-quality experimental drugs over the next five years.
Taking a more collaborative approach, as GSK has through its Open Lab, will see these advances reap the full benefit of the industry's commercial expertise
‘Academic researchers are making incredible progress in our understanding of neglected diseases yet we've still got a bottleneck when it comes to the development of new drugs,’ said Richard Seabrook, Head of Business Development at the Wellcome Trust.
‘Taking a more collaborative approach, as GSK has through its Open Lab, will see these advances reap the full benefit of the industry's commercial expertise to give us the best chance of securing new treatments for these devastating diseases.’
‘This support highlights a growing recognition that collaborative and open research is the key to tackling these devastating diseases,’ said Nick Cammack, Head of GSK's Tres Cantos Medicines Development Campus, which houses the Open Lab.
Most early-stage research collaborations currently underway at the Open Lab are funded by the Tres Cantos Open Lab Foundation, an independent charity established by GSK in 2010 with £5m seed funding.
GSK doubled this funding to £10m last year, and it is hoped that with this, and other donations, a sustainable flow of around 10 high-quality early stage drug discovery projects will be maintained at the Open Lab in the coming years.
At present there are 12 active projects in the GSK Open Lab portfolio, investigating new treatments for diseases of the developing world including malaria and TB, as well as some of the more traditionally ‘neglected’ diseases.
