GSK launches ‘Open Lab’ to share resources
pharmafile | January 21, 2010 | News story | Research and Development, Sales and Marketing | Africa, GlaxoSmithKline, malaria
GlaxoSmithKline has announced a series of measures to help improve medical treatment in poor countries.
It has set up an “Open Lab” for new medicines to treat diseases of the developing world at its R&D hub in Tres Cantos Campus, Spain.
Enshrined in a not-for-profit foundation, the new venture has an initial $8 million of funding to help facilitate research and sharing of intellectual property.
It is being created after GSK said last year that it would share resources, and offers up to 60 scientists from around the world the chance to tap into GSK’s knowledge and infrastructure while pursuing their own drug discovery projects.
At the same time, GSK is to make 13,500 malaria compounds freely available on public websites in the fight against P.falciparum, the deadliest form of malaria which is mainly found in sub-Saharan Africa.
It is the first time a pharma company has made public the structures of so many of its compounds for malaria research.
GSK has also given over the running of its “knowledge pool” of neglected tropical diseases to a third party, BIO Ventures for Global Health (BVGH).
The not-for-profit organisation Medicines for Malaria Venture (MMV) has partnered GSK over the past seven years and welcomed the announcements.
“By sharing the data from the MMV-GSK screening collaboration, the research community can start to build up a public repository of knowledge,” said MMV chief scientific officer Dr. Timothy Wells.
This should be “as powerful as the human genome databases and could set a new trend to revolutionise the urgent search for new medicines to tackle malaria”, he concluded.
GSK has also pledged to create sustainable pricing for malaria drug RTS,S – which is in late-stage trials in seven African countries.
The pricing model would cover the vaccine’s cost along with a return to be invested into research and development for second-generation malaria vaccines.
The disease kills more than a million children in Africa every year.
Finally, the GSK African Malaria Partnership has given four new grants, worth $2.5 million in total, to Save The Children in Kenya, Family Health International in Ghana, African Medical and Research Foundation in Tanzania and Planned Parenthood Foundation of Nigeria.
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