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Corporate Responsibility Report 2008

Contributing to scientific understanding

We fund basic medical research conducted outside GSK to increase understanding of the human body and the impact of disease.

This is often the foundation for future advances in the diagnosis, treatment and prevention of disease. Often this research is conducted in partnership with others, using very new technologies.

Examples from 2008 include:

Open innovation

In December 2008, we announced a joint £4.1 million investment with the Wellcome Trust to generate ‘chemical probes’ for 25 proteins involved in epigenetic signalling and to make them available to other researchers, without restriction. The partnership is part of our new commitment to promote openness in research collaborations. GSK and other pharmaceutical companies have traditionally kept research data confidential.

This public-private partnership will be led by the Structural Genomics Consortium, and involve the National Institutes of Health’s Chemical Genomics Centre in Washington, US, and the University of Oxford. The initiative could offer a new model for future interactions between academia and industry.

Collaborating to accelerate drug development

In 2008 we renewed our support for the University of Dundee’s Division of Signal Transduction Therapy (DSTT), in collaboration with the Medical Research Council and a consortium of other pharmaceutical companies.

The aim of the DSTT is to accelerate the development of drugs that treat diseases such as cancer, diabetes and rheumatoid arthritis by targeting kinase and phosphatase enzymes. The collaboration will provide £10.8 million to the DSTT between 2008 and 2012.

GSK has been working with the PATH Malaria Vaccine Initiative (MVI) since 2001 to develop the paediatric vaccine against malaria, RTS,S/AS. In December 2008 the partnership announced study results which showed that RTS,S/AS provides both infants and young children with significant protection against malaria. Pending national regulatory approvals, phase lll studies will start in seven countries across Africa in early 2009.

Patient safety

A GSK team won a 2008 Wall Street Journal ‘Technology Innovation Award’ for Healthcare IT. The team developed a new software system that helps to screen novel drug candidates for potential safety issues.

The system, known as Molecular Clinical Safety Intelligence (MCSI), helps GSK researchers to screen and prioritise novel drug candidates for potential adverse medical reactions at a much earlier stage, prior to clinical trials. The software enables direct translation of safety knowledge from human clinical experience to early-stage drug discovery for the first time.

Read more about patient safety at GSK.

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