GSK & University of California to accelerate drug discovery through new CRISPR lab

Major pharma company GSK has announced a five-year collaboration with the University of California to establish a new laboratory which will use CRISPR technologies to help accelerate the discovery of new medicines.

GSK will work with the San Francisco and Berkeley campuses of the University of California in a $67 million collaboration to create the Laboratory for Genomic Research (LGR). This new laboratory will explore the role of gene mutations in disease and how CRISPR technologies can help discover new medicines.

The laboratory will have a focus on immunology, oncology and neuroscience and will support both GSK and university employees, with the $67 million funding offered over a five-year period.

The collaboration was made following the recent emergence of genomics research, which require a need for powerful tools able to assess how a person’s genetic-make up can be an indicator for disease. CRISPR has emerged as the industry’s leading gene editing technology as it allows genetic assessments to be done at scale.

CRISPR co-inventor Jennifer Doudna and professor of biochemistry, biophysics and structural biology at UC Berkeley, said: “Over the last seven years, CRISPR has transformed academic research, but until the LGR, we haven’t had a focused effort to catalyse the kind of research we know will lead to new innovation using this CRISPR tool. LGR is about building that space where creative science is partnered with the development of robust technology that will help develop tomorrow’s drugs. I think we’re going to be able to do science that none of us can even imagine today.”

The collaboration’s ultimate goal is to deepen “our understanding of genetics and discover new targets, and to create next-generation technologies that will become future standard practice for pharma industry,” according to the University of California San Francisco’s professor of cellular and molecular pharmacology Jonathan Weissman.  

While the collaboration is a joint venture between industry and academia, Weissman iterates that “the tools that are developed in the lab will be described in published papers, subject to intellectual property provisions, and will be available for use by other academic and non-profit labs.”

The collaboration follows GSK’s work with companies such as 23andMe and will apply artificial intelligence and machine learning to build the necessary computational pipelines to analyse data.

On the University’s side, the project builds on the work of the Innovative Genomics Institute, a non-profit research centre co-directed by Doudna and Weissman and which is attempting to use CRISPR to improve public health.

The collaboration will be governed by a Joint Steering Committee with equitable University and GSK representation, and additional joint sub-committees covering patents, scientific and project management. Doudna and Weissman will be members of the Joint Steering Committee, together with GSK’s new head of functional genomics, Christopher Miller.