MRC and GSK venture to crack difficult disease areas

GSK and the Medical Research Council (MRC) are collaborating on an open innovation research initiative that aims to improve scientists’ understanding of inflammatory diseases that present a serious burden to patients.

The Experimental Medicine Initiative to Explore New Therapies (EMINENT) network will be coordinated by University College London (UCL) and bring together teams of researchers from the Universities of Cambridge, Glasgow, Newcastle, Imperial College London and UCL with GSK researchers to study the fundamental biological mechanisms responsible for a range of inflammatory diseases.

Drug development is a lengthy, costly and risky process, with the majority of promising treatments failing in clinical trials and hence never reaching patients as medicines. This is because the biological processes that underlie many diseases are still not fully understood. By gaining a better understanding of the inflammatory process in diseases such as Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) and fibrosis, the collaboration aims to improve the success rate for discovering new potential treatments for these and other diseases. 

Through the EMINENT network, MRC funding of up to £8m over five years will support academic costs. This will be matched with GSK in-kind contributions, including access to a portfolio of currently available medicines, experimental compounds, screening facilities and the company’s drug discovery and development in-house expertise. While GSK will retain ownership of the intellectual property covering these medicines and compounds, joint project teams of GSK and academic researchers will be able to use these as investigational tools to help answer scientific questions about human disease.

The initiative aims to support up to ten experimental medicine projects over the five year period. The academic research teams that are awarded funding by the MRC will work alongside their industry colleagues at both GSK and university facilities, with a view to building a legacy of expertise in translational and experimental human research across academia and industry. It is anticipated that the network will grow beyond the first five academic partners.

Information and new discoveries will be readily communicated across the network, and beyond, in a spirit of open innovation. This will help enable breakthroughs in understanding to be applied across a spectrum of diseases, maximising the potential of the initiative to bring real benefits to patients.

Minister for Life Sciences George Freeman said: “Networks of biomedical researchers from hospitals, industry and universities are key to unlocking the biomedical breakthroughs that are transforming our understanding of the mechanisms of disease and developing new diagnostics and treatments for patients.”

An independent panel of experts will assess the applications submitted by EMINENT collaborators. Projects will be assessed against the same criteria as any other MRC-funded research, based on the quality of the science. An oversight group, the Joint Steering Committee (JSC), reporting to the MRC, will ensure robust governance and alignment with MRC’s strategic priorities. 

The collaboration will also be supported by the NIHR Biomedical Research Centres at Cambridge, Newcastle, Imperial and UCL.