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Tres Cantos Medicines Development Campus

Collaborating to find new medicines for global health problems

At GSK, we are committed to searching for new treatments for many of the diseases that affect millions of people in some of the world’s least well off nations. We have a heritage and expertise in researching and developing new medicines and vaccines, and we are directing our scientific resources into this important area.

Our specialist research centre in Spain carries out research into global health priorities like malaria and TB.  We work closely in public-private partnerships, with groups including the Medicines for Malaria Venture (MMV) and the Global Alliance for TB drug Development (TB Alliance). In 2010, we stated our intention to open the Tres Cantos campus to allow GSK researchers to work more collaboratively with scientists from universities, not-for-profit partnerships and other research institutes.

In May 2010 the first step in opening up access to our compounds was realised with the publication by scientists at the Tres Cantos centre of over 13,500 promising potential hits  and additional information in the journal Nature to stimulate drug discovery research for  malaria.  Sharing of this data, including many previously proprietary compounds is, we believe, the first of its type in the industry.  We hope to encourage further research by the scientific community, bringing more minds to bear on this challenging disease. 

The chemical structures and associated assay data of these compounds are now stored on leading public scientific websites:

• European Bioinformatics Institute
• National Library of Medicine
• Collaborative Drug Discovery

To support visiting scientists and their research projects, we set up a not-for-profit group, Tres Cantos Open Lab Foundation, with an initial investment of £5 million.
In June 2011, the first external researchers took up ‘open lab’ placements, eight scientists, from six organisations, from four countries, including the United States and South Africa. They will be working on their own projects in association with GSK scientists at the Tres Cantos research campus.

The projects are:

• iThemba Pharmaceuticals:  A six-month project to identify potential new compounds against tuberculosis (TB), specifically on multidrug, extremely drug resistant TB and co-infection with HIV-AIDS.
• CRESIB, Spain (The Barcelona Centre for International Health Research):  A two-year project to create a continuous lab-based supply of the P. vivax  malaria parasite in the blood stage.  If successful this project will offer a technology breakthrough that could allow further advances in research on P. Vivax.
• CICbioGUNE, Spain.  An 18-month project to characterise the ubiquitylation profiles of cells infected by multiple drug resistant tuberculosis (TB) and the malaria parasite P.falciparum.
• Durham University, UK.  A 9-month project will be looking to identify compounds that can inhibit a new target in kinetoplastid protozoan parasites.
• Weill Cornell Medical College, US:  This 24-month project will attempt to identify compounds that can affect both drug-sensitive, multidrug- and extensively drug-resistant tuberculosis (MDR, XDR) in the non-replicating phase.
• Imperial College London, Drug Discovery Centre and The Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute:  A two month project aimed at identifying CDPK (calcium dependent protein kinases) inhibitors from the 13,500 compounds identified by GSK in 2010 as inhibiting P. falciparum growth.  

By opening the centre to more alliances and collaborations and by continuing to drive our “open innovation” agenda, we can help to provide a critical mass of knowledge and a drive for the discovery and development of desperately-needed new medicines for a number of neglected diseases, creating a truly world-leading facility that will stimulate research and collaboration in this critical area.