"The biggest surprise for me was the openness,” says Thulasi Warrier. “I thought I would be put in a cubicle and not encouraged to speak.”

That idea, together with the angst that big pharma would want to claim rights to her research findings, had been Thulasi’s preconceptions before she began her secondment in our Open Lab at Tres Cantos in Spain. But within days of arriving from New York’s Weill Cornell Medical College, Thulasi realised that quite the reverse is true. The Open Lab does what it says on the tin.

Thulasi was among the first wave of external investigators to join the Open Lab, part of our open innovation strategy which is designed to increase the number of researchers working on diseases of the developing world on a genuine, no-strings-attached basis.

The Tres Cantos Open Lab offers top international scientists and academics the opportunity to pursue their own projects as part of an integrated team. Researchers are able to access GSK’s expertise, processes, and industrial-scale infrastructure as part of a collaborative approach to drug discovery.

So far, 21 scientists have come to the Tres Cantos site just outside Madrid to work on 14 different projects alongside GSK researchers. Eight more projects have been agreed and will start over the coming months.

Thulasi arrived from Weill Cornell Medical College, renowned for its advances in tuberculosis (TB) research. She spent a year at the Open Lab facility trying to identify those compounds which inhibit biochemical pathways that are vulnerable even when the bacterium becomes ‘dormant’ in human cells. Becoming dormant is a strategy the bacterium adapts that contributes to a persistent TB infection.

“We introduced a different kind of test to the Open Lab that mimicked the bacterial conditions inside a cell so that we could work on the non-replicating, or dormant, part of the TB life cycle,” explains Thulasi. “Targeting dormancy is the key to shortening treatment time because most of the existing therapies target actively replicating bacteria.”

Thulasi’s work was funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. The majority of the first batch of projects have been supported by the Tres Cantos Open Lab Foundation, a charity established with an initial £5 million in seed funding from GSK to support suitable research. In October, GSK announced a further £5 million of funding for the Foundation.