In a speech given to the Council on Foreign Relations in New York today, GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) CEO Andrew Witty announced a list of new initiatives he is launching in an effort to demonstrate GSK’s role in helping control and prevent diseases that disproportionately affect the world’s most impoverished populations.
The list includes:
- ‘Open Lab’ established with $8m seed funding for new research
- 13,500 malaria compounds to be made freely available
- New collaborations to share intellectual property for neglected tropical diseases
- Pledge to create sustainable pricing model for world’s most advanced malaria candidate vaccine
- GSK African Malaria Partnership awards four new grants worth $2.5m
The “Open Lab” will be a research facility at GSK owned offices in Spain, open to up to 60 scientists from around the world. The scientists will be part of a drug discovery team with $8 million being spent on research and development for new medicines for diseases of the developing world.
In addition, GSK is also working with BIO Ventures for Global Health (BVGH) to create a “knowledge pool” for NTDs. GSK and BVGH have partned with the Emory Institute for Drug Discovery (EIDD) to help further “open up knowledge, chemical libraries, and other assets in the search for new medicines for neglected tropical diseases.”
In order to create a sustainable commitment for programs that support research for malaria and NTDs, Witty also announced a pledge to price GSK’s experimental malaria vaccine at just 5% above cost. This pricing model is to cover the cost of the vaccine, and the small return from it will be reinvested into research and development for GSK’s second-generation malaria vaccines and other vaccines for neglected tropical diseases.
“We are trying to set the expectation that there will be some return” for creating medicines for poor countries, he said in an interview with Forbes. “If we come out and say it is 0% profit” for the malaria vaccine, there would be no incentive for companies to invest in neglected disease research in the future.”
This is definitely a step in the right direction for the fight against NTDs!
If GSK is able to maintain a long-term, sustainable commitment to NTDs and Malaria, hopefully it will incentive other drug companies to follow suit.
Mark Green is the Managing Director of Malaria No More’s Malaria Policy Center in Washington, DC. He has served as U.S. Ambassador to Tanzania and as a U.S. Congressman. 
