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.