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An automated compound store houses hundreds of thousands
of compounds. A number of these will interact with drug
targets during screening and become potential medicines.
GlaxoSmithKline aims to have one of the largest and,
more importantly, the highest quality collection in
the industry.
The compound store pictured
here at Stevenage in the UK holds nearly half a million
compounds. Work has just been completed on a state-of-the-art
compound store at Tres Cantos in Spain which has capacity
for over two million compounds.
Such investment in technology
is already paying dividends. GlaxoSmithKline
has one of the strongest early stage pipelines in the
industry.
There are currently 123 projects in clinical development.
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GlaxoSmithKline’s aim is to become the most productive
R&D organisation in the industry.
The merger that brought about GlaxoSmithKline
accelerated a radical rethink in the way R&D is organised
and conducted.
R&D at GlaxoSmithKline takes advantage
of its size in areas such as genetics, molecular screening
and clinical research, where scale is important. However,
in some areas of drug discovery, GlaxoSmithKline has formed
six therapy-area focused and entrepreneurial units known as
Centres of Excellence for Drug Discovery (CEDDs). Their brief
is to focus on just one thing – advancing lead compounds
to the point where a therapeutic concept has been demonstrated
and large-scale clinical trials can begin.
The Group has also focused enormous amounts
of energy and resource on automation to broaden the scope
and quicken the pace of the search for new medicines. High
throughput technology, for example, increases the number of
‘hits’ identified, improves the quality of the ‘lead’
compounds and reduces the time taken to optimise them for
further development. Meanwhile, we are scrutinising each step
in the discovery and development process to reduce the element
of chance and identify potential problems earlier.
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