GSK welcomes Life Sciences Sector Deal with £40 million investment

Science-led global healthcare company, GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) has welcomed the UK government’s announcement of the Life Sciences Sector Deal, by announcing £40 million investment in genomic research.

“The UK has a world class life sciences sector, but that will only continue to thrive through a strong partnership of government, industry and academia. This Sector Deal contains a number of very practical commitments to strengthen the UK’s life science base and make it more attractive to international investment in areas such as clinical trials and high-tech research,” explained Phil Thomson, president, Global Affairs, GSK. “Ultimately, this should provide benefits to the economy and create jobs. We look forward to seeing further initiatives result from this strategy for the sector.”

The deal, which builds on the Industrial Strategy published earlier in the year by Sir John Bell, has been announced today (Wednesday 6 December) and is aimed at increasing the attractiveness of the UK within the life sciences sector.

GKS’s investment announcement joins those made by Merck and QIAGEN last month, with several other companies expected to follow suit over the next few weeks.

“This new investment by GSK, along with money from other public and private organisations, is building on the UK’s already world-leading status in the field of genomics and bioinformatics,” stated Patrick Vallance, president, R&D, GSK. “Genetic evidence has revolutionised scientific discovery and drug development in recent years by providing clear links between genes and disease. Currently, an estimated 90% of potential medicines entering clinical trials fail to demonstrate the necessary efficacy and safety, and never reach patients. Many of these failures are due to an incomplete understanding of the link between the biological target of a drug and human disease. By contrast, medicines developed with human genetic evidence have had substantially higher success rates and patient care has benefited.”

The investment by GSK will expand the company’s previously announced effort to generate genetic sequencing data from UK Biobank. Additionally, this new commitment will support the sequencing of data from all 500,000 volunteer participants, beyond the first 50,000 subset that was announced by the company earlier this year.

Moreover, this money will be used to strengthen the company’s ‘Open Targets’ collaboration with the European Bioinformatics Institute, the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, Biogen and Takeda — established in 2014 in Cambridge — which makes genetic and biological data openly available to help researchers identify and prioritise new targets for developing future medicines.