GSK Announces Further Initiatives to Advance Openness and Collaboration to Help Tackle Global Health Challenges
Issued: Thursday 11 October 2012, London UK
?Tuberculosis (TB) ‘compound library’ to be made
available to help stimulate research into TB
?Investment in GSK’s Tres Cantos Open Lab to be doubled with
an additional £5m funding awarded
?Detailed data from GSK clinical trials to be made available to
researchers to further scientific understanding and knowledge
GSK today announced new measures to further advance its commitment
towards greater openness, transparency and collaboration. Speaking
at a meeting hosted by the Wellcome Trust in London today, GSK CEO
Sir Andrew Witty will outline new steps to build on the encouraging
signs of progress resulting from GSK’s ‘open
innovation’ approach to R&D, designed to help develop new
solutions for the world’s most serious health challenges.
Over the past few years, GSK has been making fundamental changes to
its business model to become more open to sharing its intellectual
property and knowledge, and to forming partnerships to help
stimulate more R&D into diseases that most affect the
world’s poorest people. Building on that progress, today GSK
will set out new measures to help develop new and faster-acting
treatments for tuberculosis (TB), a huge global health need where
R&D has been at an impasse, and to support independent research
into diseases of the developing world.
GSK will also outline new commitments to share detailed clinical
trial data to enable additional scientific inquiry and analyses to
further scientific knowledge and help bring benefit to
patients.
Commenting ahead of the meeting, Andrew Witty said: “As a
truly global healthcare company, I believe we have a responsibility
to do all we can at GSK to use our resources, knowledge and
expertise to help tackle serious global health challenges. However,
the complexity of the science and the scale of the challenge mean
that we cannot solve these problems alone. We need to take a
different approach – one focused on partnership,
collaboration and openness. By being more open with our clinical
trial data, we also hope to help further scientific understanding.
I am pleased with the progress we have made so far to evolve our
business model but we recognise there is more we can do and the new
initiatives outlined today will enable us to build on this
work.”
Sir Mark Walport, Director of the Wellcome Trust, said: “In
its commitment towards more openness and collaboration, GSK is
setting an example of how the pharmaceutical industry must adapt to
help drive forward medical advances. Real breakthroughs do not come
out of nowhere, but are borne of scientists sharing their knowledge
and learning from each other. GSK’s moves are bold and
innovative, a very positive sign of its commitment to tackle some
of the greatest health challenges facing the world
today.”
GSK’s TB ‘compound library’ to be made freely
available
GSK scientists have screened the company’s entire
pharmaceutical compound library of more than two million compounds
for any that may inhibit tuberculosis (TB) bacteria and will
publish in a scientific journal the results of this process –
about 200 promising hits that could act as new starting points for
the discovery of new medicines for TB.
This is the first time a pharmaceutical company will have made
public its own proprietary compounds which have demonstrated signs
of activity against TB. It is hoped this will encourage others to
pursue a fully open approach to research in to a disease that
causes around 1.5 million deaths around the world every year.
This builds on a similar work carried out by GSK in 2009 to place
all of its malaria compounds in the public domain. Since the
publication of this data in 2010, GSK’s anti-malarial dataset
has been shared with research institutions around the world,
resulting in a number of promising research projects now
underway.
An additional £5m funding awarded to GSK’s ‘Open
Lab’
In a further move to foster the sharing of scientific knowledge and
learning across the scientific community, GSK will double its
funding for its ‘Open Lab’ at Tres Cantos, Spain,
awarding it an additional £5m.
The ‘Open Lab’ was established in 2010 to allow
independent researchers access to GSK facilities, resources and
knowledge to help them advance their own research projects into
diseases of the developing world.
Two years since the ‘Open Lab’ was established, there
are now 16 research projects in the portfolio. For example,
iThemba, a company supported by the South African Government, has
worked on a project at the ‘Open Lab’ to identify
potential new compounds against tuberculosis (TB), specifically
multidrug, extremely drug resistant TB and co-infection with
HIV-AIDS. There are further projects underway at Tres Cantos
looking at TB, malaria, Chagas disease, leishmaniasis and sleeping
sickness.
The majority of these projects are supported by the Tres Cantos
Open Lab Foundation, an independent, not-for-profit organisation
established with £5 million in funding from GSK. Overseen by
a board of leading scientists, the Foundation provides funding and
support to researchers to help them develop and advance new ideas
that could lead to new medicines to treat diseases of the
developing world. Researchers supported by the Foundation are
encouraged to share their work to ensure their discoveries are also
accessible to other researchers.
Detailed data from GSK clinical trials to be made available
GSK is fully committed to sharing information about its clinical
trials. It posts summary information about each trial it begins and
shares the summary results of all of its clinical trials –
whether positive or negative – on a website accessible to
all. Today this website includes almost 4,500 clinical trial result
summaries and receives an average of almost 10,000 visitors each
month. The company has also committed to seek publication of the
results of all of its clinical trials that evaluate its medicines
– regardless of what the results say – to peer-reviewed
scientific journals.
Expanding further on its commitments to openness and transparency,
GSK also announced today that the company will create a system that
will enable researchers to access the detailed anonymised
patient-level data that sit behind the results of clinical trials
of its approved medicines and discontinued investigational
medicines. To ensure that this information will be used for valid
scientific endeavour, researchers will submit requests which will
be reviewed for scientific merit by an independent panel of experts
and, where approved, access will be granted via a secure web site.
This will enable researchers to examine the data more closely or to
combine data from different studies in order to conduct further
research, to learn more about how medicines work in different
patient populations and to help optimise the use of medicines with
the aim of improving patient care.
This initiative is a step towards the ultimate aim of the clinical
research community developing a broader system where researchers
will be able to access data from clinical trials conducted by
different sponsors. GSK hopes the experience gained through this
initiative will be of value in developing and catalysing this wider
approach.
GlaxoSmithKline – one of the world’s leading
research-based pharmaceutical and healthcare companies – is
committed to improving the quality of human life by enabling people
to do more, feel better and live longer. For further information
please visit www.gsk.com.
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Cautionary statement regarding forward-looking statements
Under the safe harbor provisions of the U.S. Private Securities
Litigation Reform Act of 1995, GSK cautions investors that any
forward-looking statements or projections made by GSK, including
those made in this announcement, are subject to risks and
uncertainties that may cause actual results to differ materially
from those projected. Factors that may affect GSK' s operations are
described under 'Risk factors' in the 'Financial review & risk'
section in the company's Annual Report 2011 included as exhibit
15.2 to the company's Annual Report on Form 20-F for 2011.
Posted: October 2012
