MRC, GSK and UK Uni’s Collab for Inflammatory Diseases Drug Development
GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) and the UK’s Medical Research Council (MRC) will be collaborating in an open innovation research initiative aiming to improve scientists’ understanding of inflammatory diseases. The Experimental Medicine Initiative to Explore New Therapies (EMINENT) network will bring together researchers from the Universities of Cambridge, Glasgow, Newcastle, Imperial College London and UCL, with GSK scientists to study the fundamental biological mechanisms responsible for a range of inflammatory diseases. 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.
The initiative aims to support up to ten experimental medicine projects over a five-year period. Information and new discoveries will be 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.
GSK’s President of Pharmaceuticals R&D, Patrick Vallance, commented ‘We believe that by sharing our resources and research during the early stages of research we can stimulate innovation within the scientific community, strengthen our understanding of human disease and accelerate the development of new treatments for patients. We need to embrace opportunities to work together and share information about our successes and failures.’
Professor Sir John Savill, Chief Executive at the Medical Research Council, said: ‘Despite major progress made over the last 20 years in many disease areas, some hard-to-treat conditions still carry high morbidity and mortality. We believe this innovative approach could be applied in other areas to combine the work of academia and industry.’