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CR Report 2005

Introduction

Welcome to GSK’s Corporate Responsibility Report 2005. This report explains our approach to the wide range of social, ethical and environmental issues associated with our business and reports our performance in 2005.

GSK is a research-based pharmaceutical company, with operations in 119 countries. We make prescription medicines, vaccines, over-the-counter medicines, and consumer healthcare products. Our business accounts for 6.3% of the world’s pharmaceutical market. We have strong positions in several therapeutic areas including anti-infectives, asthma, cancer, cardiovascular, depression, diabetes, HIV/AIDS and urology. For an overview of our business, see our Annual Report.

Our contribution to society
In the last 80 years, medicines and vaccines have transformed millions of lives. They have helped to increase life expectancy and lowered death rates from conditions such as heart disease, stroke and cancer. Medicines enable many people with chronic diseases to enjoy good health and lead full lives. In developed countries, healthcare advances mean most people are no longer at risk from diseases such as polio and TB that were major threats less than a century ago.

But continued research and development of new medicines is vital. There are still many serious illnesses for which there are few treatments or where treatments may be improved.

Discovering and developing new medicines is expensive – the average cost is around £450 million and it takes an average of 15 years. Society now relies on the pharmaceutical industry to fund most of this research, indeed the majority of medicines used around the world have been developed by the pharmaceutical industry.

GSK invested £3.1 billion in R&D in 2005 and employs over 15,000 people. We have 149 prescription medicines and vaccines in clinical development.

We believe that our business makes a valuable contribution to society by developing and marketing medicines which improve people’s lives. However we recognise that the research, development, manufacture and sale of medicines raise ethical issues for some stakeholders. We listen to these concerns and address them where we can.

This report explains our approach to the significant corporate responsibility issues for our business, including:

Access to medicines – how we make our medicines accessible to poor patients in developed and developing countries
Research and development – how we maintain high ethical standards in our research and the publication of research results
Sales and marketing – how we maintain high ethical standards in the sales and marketing of our products

It also covers our employment practices and approach to human rights, our environmental performance and our community investment.