The Crick launches landmark agreement with leading pharmaceutical company
The Crick has announced an exciting new open science collaboration with GSK, the UK’s largest healthcare company.
This is the first partnership to be established between the Crick and a pharmaceutical company. The two organisations will work together to explore new avenues of medical research and drug discovery across a broad range of diseases, with a view to achieving breakthroughs in the understanding of human health and disease.
One of the greatest challenges in developing new medicines is knowing where to start: scientists still have much to learn about the underlying biology of many diseases, which makes developing effective drug discovery programmes very difficult.
The GSK – Crick open science collaboration will combine the specialised discovery science knowledge of the Crick’s scientists with the pharmaceutical Research & Development (R&D) expertise of GSK scientists, opening up possibilities for scientific discovery that would not be possible for each partner working alone.
David Roblin, Chief Operating Officer & Director of Scientific Translation at the Francis Crick Institute, said: “This truly represents a landmark agreement in open science. We shall have industrial scientists completely embedded within collaborating laboratories and fully integrated within the Crick as a whole. Together we shall accelerate breakthroughs in the understanding of human health and disease. GSK is an outstanding first partner to work with and I am excited to see what we deliver together.”
GSK’s president of pharmaceuticals R&D, Patrick Vallance, said: “The Francis Crick Institute combines some of the world’s best scientific minds and promises to firmly cement the UK as a global leader in life sciences research. We’re thrilled to be the first industry partner of this dynamic organisation and believe that by working alongside one another, combining our unique strengths, we’ll be well-placed to make game-changing advances in our understanding of human disease, which will ultimately improve our ability to make new medicines.”
In the spirit of open innovation, research findings from the collaboration will be shared with the broader scientific community, via joint publication in peer-reviewed journals. This will enable important discoveries to be applied across the research community, maximising the potential for the collaboration to progress scientific understanding and accelerate the development of treatments for patients.
