GSK and gene profiling group 23andMe set out aims
UK drugmaker aims to launch clinical trial by end of the year
GlaxoSmithKline expects its partnership with consumer genetics testing company 23andMe to have selected its first drug target and launched a clinical trial by the end of the year.
Emma Walmsley, chief executive of the UK drugmaker, said the unusual $300m deal was set to improve the productivity of research and development, with 23andMe providing genetic information and a way to eventually reach potential trial participants. GSK and 23andMe, which are exploring many potential drug candidates together, have not yet revealed the disease the first drug will be designed to treat.
Ms Walmsley’s timeline, disclosed in an interview with The Financial Times on the sidelines of the annual JPMorgan healthcare conference in San Francisco, comes after 23andMe licensed its first drug candidate to Spanish dermatology drugmaker Almirall last week. Almirall aims to take the antibody, which affects inflammatory diseases, into clinical trials. 23andMe is also developing its own drugs outside of the partnership.
She said the idea was “very simple” — that genetically validated targets had a higher probability of leading to successful medicines.
She added that 23andMe had the largest data set of its kind, with about 10m customers contributing — about 80 per cent of whom volunteered to participate in research. “They are people who tend towards being engaged in their health, not just for them, but for their kids,” she said.
As she seeks to revitalise the company’s R&D operation, which has long been regarded as lagging behind rivals in the number of profitable medicines it produces, Ms Walmsley has cast the work with 23andMe as part of a far broader attempt to speed up drug discovery and reduce research costs by harnessing genetic insights.
A collaboration with two of the pioneers of the CRISPR gene-editing technology — Jennifer Doudna and Jonathan Weissman at the University of California, for example — is intended to build on the partnership with 23andMe, the company has made clear.
The university joined forces with GSK last year to establish the Laboratory for Genomics Research, “to unravel mysteries of the human genome”.
Ms Walmsley said her strategy of having a head of R&D in San Francisco was paying off with their ability to hire machine learning experts and form partnerships in an industry that was “going to be disrupted by technology”. GSK also has a partnership with Verily, Alphabet’s life sciences arm, to develop bioelectronics: tiny implantable devices that could treat diseases such as asthma and arthritis.
Speaking to reporters in July, Hal Barron, head of R&D at GSK, said the academic-industry collaboration with the University of California “is very much related to our interest and belief that by using functional genomics and being state of the art and pushing that technology further, we will actually be able to gain insights from the 23andMe data set that might have been difficult to observe previously”.
The company, Mr Barron said, saw “a real synergy between our focus on human genetics, like 23andMe, and our functional genomics and machine learning technology focus” that would “result in, hopefully, many new targets that could be differentiated in medicine”.