GSK has received £5m funding from the Wellcome Trust to support its collaborative work aimed at developing new drugs for diseases of the developing world.

The ‘open innovation’ research facility at Tres Cantos, Madrid, brings GSK’s drug discovery specialists together with 27 external researchers.

The funding will help to build on early-stage research to develop new medicines for tropical diseases including malaria, TB, Leishmaniasis and sleeping sickness.

The Open Lab facility, created by GSK in 2010, aims to develop two significant experimental drugs over the next five years, based on the most promising early-stage research both at Tres Cantos and at GSK.

GSK’s commitment to ‘open innovation’ was signalled by CEO Andrew Witty’s comment in 2012 that “the market has failed” to bring forward new drugs that are needed but will not generate immediate high revenues.

Dr Nick Cammack, Head of GSK’s Tres Cantos Medicines Development Campus, said: “This support highlights a growing recognition that collaborative and open research is the key to tackling these devastating diseases.

“Since adopting an open approach to discovering new medicines for developing world diseases, we’ve hosted some of the world's brightest academic scientists at Tres Cantos. The fusion of their academic excellence with GSK expertise has yielded some really exciting research projects.

“This tremendous show of support from the Wellcome Trust means we now have the potential to start driving these projects further towards finding new medicines.”

The Wellcome Trust is an independent global charitable foundation that supports research to improve human and animal health.

Dr Richard Seabrook, the Trust’s Head of Business Development, commented: “Academic researchers are making incredible progress in our understanding of neglected diseases, yet we’ve still got a bottleneck when it comes to the development of new drugs.

“Taking a more collaborative approach, as GSK have through their open lab, will see these advances reap the full benefit of the industry’s commercial expertise to give us the best chance of securing new treatments for these devastating diseases.”

This month Brigadier Pinching shares a surprisingly palatable civil service coffee with the Department of Health’s NHS/big pharma relationship expert, Naima Khondkar.

I love Elephant and Castle. If you are in any doubt about where you are, just outside the station, there is large sculpture of... an elephant and a castle. Oxford Circus, King’s Cross and Cockfosters have clearly missed out on a neat trick. Anyway, I digress, for I was in central London on important business – to chat with Naima about how the private and public sector could make their marriage work. Having spent six years in curious governmental buildings, this was my territory. Bring on the future!

Hi Naima, what’s your story?

At the Department of Health I work in the Medicines, Pharmacy and Industry Group. The head is Giles Denham and he has a number of teams which sit under him. One looks after the pricing environment – which is very topical right now because of the negotiations – while the pharmacy team takes care of community and pharmacy issues. Another concentrates on prescription policy, and I’m in the industry sponsorship team.

How do you guys roll?

We’re almost account managers for the pharmaceutical industry, within government, and also the first port of call on health policy issues concerning research-based pharma companies, including global outfits that have locations in the UK. There’s a very high-level of strategic engagement, driven by the Ministerial Industry Strategy Group, which combines global heads of pharma, from as far afield as Japan and America, and ministers from health, business, the treasury and UKTI (UK Trade and Investment). The discussions are a great way to highlight how government policy can help partnerships. Our minister, Earl Howe, is a particularly engaging contributor, while ‘No 10’ frequently sends along a representative, indicating how serious the Government is about forming cohesive inter-sector partnerships.

How has the concept of joint working progressed?

Over the last few years we have carefully considered how to fundamentally improve the relationship between industry and the NHS, and a lot of this consideration has been carried out in conjunction with colleagues at the ABPI. There is still a lot of mistrust on both sides, however, and that is one of the greatest challenges reform needs to overcome. The NHS has the perception of pharma as being a big bad wolf, just above the arms and tobacco industries in terms of popularity! For some reason people have a big problem with the pharmaceutical industry making any kind of money. Sometimes I think the level of suspicion is unjustified, but then again, I don’t think pharma do themselves many favours sometimes. It’s important to be open and honest about these things! Equally, the NHS can sometimes be over-sensitive – they don’t like to be told by other people how to do their job.

What needs to change?

There needs to be a shift in how people on both sides view one another and they must learn to wipe the slate clean. Bad relationships can date back to minor incidents that happened 25 years ago, when a young, naive rep went into a meeting with a box of doughnuts to help flog a new product. Something as trivial as this may have resulted in a door being shut. Whereas now NHS representatives need to re-engage, open doors and think about the broader benefits of working together with the pharmaceutical industry towards joint goals. It’s really important that both sides build allegiances and forget past animosities. Ultimately this will benefit everyone.

Do the ‘different’ motivations of the public and private sector make gelling difficult?

There is an incorrect perception that, because pharma makes money, someone else has lost. We must remember that if people have their lives extended due to better treatment then NHS, industry and wider society has won. Recently Helen Bevan, NHS Director for Transformation, said both industries have been very target driven in the last 15 years and, consequently, the humanity factor has eroded. Healthcare professionals on the frontline have been too busy with waiting lists and reductions, while sales reps have been under enormous pressure to shift products and been too focussed on sales. Patient cases have become about performance measurement rather than health outcome, or quality of experience. Clearly there needs to be a radical change in priorities.

What can big pharma do to engender trust?

Their approach can be ill-informed sometimes. Often they think they know the NHS, but actually they need to fully appreciate the complexities of what is an ever-evolving beast. Companies need to consider who they make responsible to forge vital connections and forming sustainable relationships. They regularly send an under-qualified person, who might have the enthusiasm, but not the authority. With joint working one of the big issues has been compliance and, often, the pharma representative at the table can’t actually make a decision about whether a company can work in a certain way. This is one of the areas we are really trying to help with.

How should they alter their approach?

If pharma goes in simply looking for a market share increase, they’ll get figured out straight away. Representatives of the big companies need to prove that they genuinely want to improve a health economy or health outcome, before profits. These are the aspects that make the whole system better, and ultimately everyone wins. The CCGs want more people appropriately treated and that means less hospital admissions and, in turn, more financial resources will be available for commissioning. In this respect pharma needs to look at the bigger picture. Remember, every service that the NHS uses is a business – from nurses to bed sheets – but because of the fractious history, the NHS is suspicious about pharma making money. When they do engage the NHS needs to feel like pharma is an integrated and credible part of the solution, as opposed to a procured service. It’s a fine balancing act.

What are the priorities when it comes to galvanising joint working?

Since joint working was outlined as part of NHS reform we have been keen to establish how it can be improved. A policy working group in 2007 carried out some market research and they came up with some recommendations. The two major areas of focus, on our side, were the issuing of guidance – clear definitions of how the NHS works - and the language that should be used. This is a refreshingly concise 11 page document. We also addressed the practical side by combining with the ABPI to launch the, ‘Joint Working tool kit’. It’s an interactive quick-start guide, which includes exactly what the NHS’s definition of joint working is, essential templates and a versatile project management tool. Above all, it avoids jargon and allows people to understand what is required straight away. This has been endorsed by NICE, the NHS Alliance and Confederation among others. We will be looking again at how we can update these documents and make them more practical in the ‘new world’ and also partnering with industry [through the ABPI] and the NHS to review and revitalise both these tools.

Are you optimistic about fruitful partnerships?

Joint working will continue to be an important focus and a part of my day job. QiPP came and went, so we had to hold fire for a while, but now Innovation Health and Wealth (IHW) has provided a restructure, we are pretty sure of what is happening; six months ago we sat down and established that the shift of power is moving to CCGs. Now individual CCGs. Director of Partnerships, Ivan Ellul is particularly keen on localised, dynamic relationships and Mike Farrar is also a champion. Ian Carruthers is the NHS England lead for IHW and is also keen to encourage this type of engagement.

Do you feel that the tide is turning already?

I’m resolutely positive about changes within the NHS. I’ve had heated discussions with clinicians and pharma about joint working, because a lot of them see it as more rhetoric. Some companies, however, are hugely proactive and want to be pioneers of change. GSK are a good example. They’ve shifted their entire salesforce to encourage new ways of working with NHS counterparts. Their leader, Andrew Witty, is passionate about successfully transforming approaches and he’s someone you can believe in, because GSK have freed up patents, conformed to the ‘alltrials’ ideology and shared data. This has filtered down to the way they engage with the NHS and the company have been very smart, as they realise it’s about increasing the whole market. If a healthcare pathway improves it will produce better diagnosis, and better diagnosis means more appropriate and timely use of medicines.

Well said, thanks Naima!

Sir Andrew Witty, Chief Executive of GlaxoSmithKline (GSK), has been asked by the Government to find ways of strengthening the partnerships between universities and the private sector.

The man recently described in the BMJ as “the acceptable face of big pharma” will conduct a review and suggest practical means of ensuring that more discoveries made by academic researchers bring commercial benefits.

Witty’s review seeks a new model for industry-academic partnerships (across a range of industries) as funding for the Technology Strategy Board (TSB) continues to be cut back.

The role of Local Enterprise Partnerships, which lack the funding and powers of the now-abolished Regional Development Agencies, is one aspect of local partnership that Witty will consider.

Another is the effectiveness of universities in training scientists and other skilled professionals to take up roles in industry.

According to the Government, Witty will “identify where we have world-leading capabilities in our research base that can underpin the sectors and technologies of the industrial strategy”.

“A strong relationship between businesses and universities can provide real growth opportunities in local areas,” said University and Science Minister David Willetts. “By forging links and sharing best practice, an efficient and practical partnership will help to boost the economy, benefiting both businesses and institutions.”

The relationship between industry and academia is already changing. The number of ‘spin-out’ companies formed by university researchers increased from 2,457 in 2010 to 3,118 in 2011; but cuts in the TSB’s budget have reduced the number of formal ‘knowledge transfer partnerships’ between universities and companies.

Sir Andrew Witty commented: “It is vitally important that the world-leading capabilities in our universities and research base are at the heart of both the industrial strategy and local growth strategies that recognise and build on areas of local strength.”

Doctor and writer Ben Goldacre has upset the ABPI with his claims about the ‘corruption’ of evidence-based
medicine – yet he’s been credited with influencing GSK’s new policy on clinical trial data. In an exclusive interview, Goldacre tells Pf about the good, the bad and the dodgy in pharma.

There’s no getting away from Ben Goldacre. He’s the fast-blogging front man of the AllTrials campaign, which seeks to make the publication of all clinical trials (new or old) relating to drugs in current use an industry and medical norm – in practice, not just in theory. His book Bad Pharma accuses the industry of exploiting weaknesses in medical practice and regulation to distort the evidence base of medicine through biased trials, ghostwritten papers, selective publishing and use of KOLs. He’s calling for a rebuilding of “the information architecture of evidence-based medicine”.

Industry critics in the UK and the US have accused Goldacre of focusing on “historic” issues, failing to back up his assertions with evidence, and “cherry-picking” extreme cases. These claims misrepresent a measured and coherent book that is by no means a hatchet job on the pharma industry. Indeed, Goldacre makes it clear that “there is no medicine without medicines”. His first book, Bad Science, defended the principles of modern medicine against the claims of ‘alternative’ therapies. He describes himself as a “critical friend” of pharma – and GSK might well agree, having signed up to the AllTrials campaign this month.

Goldacre himself is no web-dwelling misfit. He’s a doctor with an M.A. in philosophy and research fellowships in psychiatry and epidemiology. He’s also won the Association of British Science Writers award for best feature, twice. Pf readers may also be interested to note that his father is a professor of public health at the University of Oxford, while his mother is the enigmatic vocalist of proto-Goth 1970s
band Fox.

Pf will review Bad Pharma on its website. Meanwhile, we interviewed Ben Goldacre on his view of the industry. Without pausing to comb his hair, he gave us an entertaining and pointed account of a situation in which “people know that there’s something a little bit wrong”. Can you honestly disagree?

Dodgy data
GSK has announced that it will publish all trial data relating to its current products, with older data being released over several years. Goldacre tells us that he met Andrew Witty, CEO of GSK, before the announcement. “He’d obviously thought very carefully about the practicalities of it, and that reassures me – he’d thought about how to do it, what the costs would be, and I think it’s to his enormous credit.”

None the less, Goldacre says, “what we really need is meaningful structural change where everybody is incentivised and induced and, to an extent, cajoled into doing the right thing. The basics of evidence-based medicine require that we have all of the evidence in order to make informed decisions, and we need that for doctors, not just for regulators.” Still, he notes, even one major company signing up poses the question: “Why is it that GSK are happy for doctors and patients to be able to see all of the evidence on their treatments, whilst other companies aren’t happy with that?”

Bad Pharma did not ‘reveal’ any hidden things, Goldacre insists: “It took very well documented problems in medicine from the academic literature and offered the general public an accessible explanation of those problems, because I feel very strongly that there are various ongoing structural problems in medicine which go way beyond just the pharmaceutical industry. And these problems have not been fixed behind closed doors by the professions, so I think we need the public’s help.” By “the public”, he means the many professionals – lawyers, civil servants, campaigners – who “can bring about structural change”.

The industry’s initial reaction to the book was defensive. “The ABPI put out various things saying that I was a fringe maverick who wasn’t taken seriously by anyone in medicine or academia or by regulators, and I think seeing that led various people to conclude that it was worth creating a more well-structured campaign.”

Stressing a key point, Goldacre notes: “When the public are made aware that drug companies and academics are still entitled to withhold results on medicines that we currently use from doctors and patients, they are amazed and appalled. The ABPI’s press release about my book said that all of the issues in it were historic and had all been long addressed, which is obviously untrue. I think policy makers have to be very concerned about an organisation that is willing to make such sweeping dismissals of legitimate and well documented concerns.

“For the ABPI to state that they were refusing to engage with the concerns that I raised in the book was an extraordinary thing, and it has been well noted throughout the medical and policy communities. I think my views are ultimately reasonably well aligned with those of industry. I would regard myself as a critical friend: I’m talking about problems that need to be fixed.”

Single bed
But surely, and leaving pious pharma rhetoric aside, the industry has to do what it does to get new medicines out there? Goldacre’s response is milder than you might expect. “Medicines work, there’s no question about that. But if you work in the pharmaceutical industry, you might miss how many criticisms of doctors, academics and regulators there are in the book. We invented evidence-based medicine very recently, only three or four decades ago, and since then we’ve all run around pretending that we have instantiated it already. But the reality is, we haven’t.

“I don’t think it’s unreasonable or unrealistic to say that we can manage profit incentive in the pharmaceutical industry in such a way that their goals are more closely aligned with the goals of patients. If you have an incoherent information architecture, lots of opacity around evidence, and regulatory
frameworks that are undoubtedly very onerous for industry, but still fail to achieve very simple objectives like getting doctors all of the evidence on whether drugs work or not, then companies are competing with each other across terrain that actively rewards bad behaviour.

“I’d like to see a world in which companies are all competing across terrain that actively rewards ethical behaviour like sharing all of the data on how well their treatments work. I think it should be perfectly possible to make lots of money out of the best drugs in a class, and if that means that you may not be able to profit from the third best drug in a class to the extent that you can today by obfuscating around the evidence – well, so be it, because I think overall, industry would benefit from clearer information, as doctors and patients would.”

Straight talking
Goldacre sums up the issue: “Industry does one thing that’s really great and one thing that’s not so great. Industry creates new medicines, and that’s fantastic and really important, and it’s obviously to the benefit of doctors and patients. But then there’s this second issue of how doctors and patients make decisions about which treatment is best. And in that arena, the pharmaceutical industry is obviously very conflicted. Each company wants you to use their products, so in an environment where we accept that you can withhold the results of clinical trials and put spin on their results when they’re published in academic journals, it’s inevitable that people will try and do that.”

Much of the blame rests with regulators for decades of underachievement, he argues. For example, “there’s this bizarre idea that it is satisfactory for the EU Clinical Trials Register to be a register of all the clinical trials conducted in Europe. Now that is not actually a very useful list. The Register, were it to be genuinely useful, would be very simply a list of all of the trials ever conducted on all of the medicines that are currently licensed for use in Europe.” That “failure of vision”, he says, speaks volumes about the culture of medicine.

What’s needed, he argues, is for “doctors, governments, healthcare payers and academics” to be “better at creating systems for synthesising evidence, disseminating it to decision makers, and then implementing best practice”. If that were the situation, he says, the “biased dissemination of evidence” that is marketing – and as he fairly points out, that is what marketing has to be – could not weaken clinical outcomes.

Golden ticket
Goldacre offers no support to those who dismiss modern medicine in favour of mystical alternatives. “Just because there are flaws in aircraft design, that doesn’t mean magic carpets exist. The fact that there are problems in medicine doesn’t mean that magic sugar pills work.” However, he argues, the antimedical conspiracy theories “are a kind of poetic response to the obvious regulatory failure in medicine and in the pharmaceutical industry. People know that there is something a little bit wrong here.”

He also separates himself from leftwing critiques of corporate culture. “I don’t have a sense that there’s anything wrong with companies making money from making medicines. I think this is actually a really uncomplicated area: we’ve failed to adequately manage the risks around biased dissemination and withheld clinical trial results, and we should manage those.”

At the heart of it all, Goldacre maintains, is a self-evident truth: “You’ve just got to publish all the results of all of your trials. You wouldn’t choose a car based on only the positive results in a world where industry was allowed to delete half the reviews. It’s a very strange situation that we’ve allowed to emerge.”

The lack of new antibiotics is exposing the UK population to serious risk from untreatable gonorrhoea, the Health Protection Agency (HPA) has warned.

The Agency’s Gonorrhoea Resistance Action Plan aims to maximise the effectiveness of existing treatments after a year in which new diagnoses rose by 25%.

The increasing prevalence of antibiotic-resistant strains draws attention to the lack of new therapies, a problem highlighted by GSK’s Andrew Witty in 2012.

The action plan, developed by the HPA’s Gonococcal Resistance to Antimicrobials Surveillance Programme (GRASP), places emphasis on data collection, rapid detection of treatment failures, and actions to reduce infection rates.

The GRASP data show that new gonorrhoea diagnoses rose by 25% in 2011 to nearly 21,000. Men who have sex with men made up a third of new infections, compared to a quarter in 2010.

With treatment failures occurring worldwide and no new antibiotics in the pipeline, England’s Chief Medical Officer recently argued that antibiotic resistance should be considered a civil emergency on a par with terrorism.

Professor Cathy Ison, lead author of the action plan, said: “Ensuring treatment-resistant gonorrhoea strains do not persist and spread remains a major public health concern. The GRASP Action Plan sets out practical, measurable actions to extend the useful life of the current recommended therapies in England and Wales.”

Current fears that the transfer of sexual health services to the council-funded public health system will see cuts in these services has intensified concern about the likely spread of untreatable gonorrhoea.

Andrew Witty, CEO of GSK, commented in 2012 that by the time a viable commercial model for new antibiotics existed, it would be too late to avert a serious pandemic. “The market has failed,” he concluded.

Antibiotic Action, a new UK-led initiative to encourage global investment in the development of new antibiotics, is working to establish an all-party Parliamentary Group that can address the issue.

Professor Laura Piddock, Director of Antibiotic Action, commented: “The GRASP Action Plan is a good example of why we need new drugs, and begs the question why they are not being developed for this infection. Government must act now to avert this and similar crises that threaten the health of our nation.”

GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) plans redundancies in its European sales and administration force to help it cut £1bn from its annual European, R&D and manufacturing costs by 2016.

The London-based pharma giant said it will achieve most of the cost reductions through technical improvements in its R&D and manufacturing processes.

According to CEO Andrew Witty, the cost savings plan has been driven by drug pricing pressures across Europe as the recession continues to worsen.

He also noted that job cuts would primarily affect sales and administration staff across Europe, but did not indicate the likely numbers.

Witty emphasised that GSK has six new drugs (including treatments for HIV, type 2 diabetes, melanoma and asthma) under review by regulatory bodies, with late-stage clinical trial data expected for another nine products within two years.

The company aims to launch up to 15 products within three years, he told business analysts. But given the economic uncertainties affecting Europe, 2013 would be a year of “twists and turns” and “not everything is going to go smoothly”.

According to a company spokeswoman, the technical and staffing changes (including redundancy payments) will have a combined one-off cost of £1.5bn, and will primarily be focused on Europe.

The ‘empty’ antibiotic pipeline threatens a future of mass death from antibiotic-resistant infections, the UK Chief Medical Officer has said.

Professor Dame Sally Davies told a Parliamentary committee that the pharmaceutical industry has no solutions to the growing problem of antibiotic resistance.

Overuse of antibiotics, especially in the developing world, and the combined impact of sex tourism and medical tourism were globalising the most serious health threats, the committee heard.

Antibiotic resistance has been recognised as a problem in Europe for decades, with the power of the standard antibiotics to fight disease steadily waning.

However, the massive current use of antibiotics in countries such as India, where private drug supply is deregulated, has caused a proliferation of drug-resistant infections that are spreading through the developed world.

Professor Davies warned: “The apocalyptic scenario is that when I need a new hip in 20 years I’ll die from a routine infection because we’ve run out of antibiotics.”

Antibiotic-resistant strains of tuberculosis and gonorrhoea are spreading globally, she said. Meanwhile, the pharmaceutical industry is failing to develop new antibiotics because there is no urgent need for them – but when there is, it may be too late to prevent a lethal pandemic.

GSK’s CEO, Andrew Witty, made the same point last year and warned that “the market has failed” to address the danger. He called for global collaboration between health systems and industry.

“There is a broken market model for making new antibiotics, so it's an empty pipeline, so as they become resistant, these bugs... there will not be new antibiotics to come,” said Professor Davies.

The spread of drug-resistant strains of gonorrhoea led to a 25% rise in newly diagnosed cases of the disease in England in 2011.

With some European patients showing full resistance to first-line treatments, the Health Protection Agency has warned that gonorrhea may become “a very difficult infection to treat”.

The growing medical crisis highlights the need for new and more specific antibiotics that was noted by GSK’s Andrew Witty in March.

Gonorrhoea is a bacterial infection that can lead to infertility if not effectively treated with antibiotics.

Professor Cathy Ison, a gonorrhoea expert at the HPA, said that drug resistance had been dealt with in the past by the use of a new drug – but now there isn’t one.

Dr Gwenda Hughes, Head of Sexually Transmitted Infection Surveillance at the HPA, warned: “We are worried that in the next five years, or some point in the future, that this is going to be a very difficult infection to treat.”

Sexual health will shortly become the responsibility of local authorities rather than the NHS, though medication will remain essential to the treatment of sexually transmitted infections.

GSK Chief Executive Sir Andrew Witty has ruled out a takeover bid for AstraZeneca.

Sir Andrew told shareholders at the company’s annual general meeting yesterday not to expect any major takeovers in the future as GSK focuses on the potential of its pipeline.

In response to a question over a possible merger, Sir Andrew said a deal for AZ would be “very distracting” at a time when experimental drugs in its pipeline are entering an exciting period.

The future of AstraZeneca remains uncertain as the company battles against generic competition, setbacks in drug development and the loss of its CEO David Brennan after he retires on June 1.

Revenue was down by 8% in the first three months of this year at AZ with sales in the US, Western Europe, Established Rest of the World and Emerging Rest of the World all falling.

David Brennan announced his retirement to coincide with the publication of the Q1 results after admitting that the pharmaceutical sector is “experiencing pressures none of which I’ve witnessed in my 36 years in the industry”.

AZ shareholders had criticised his leadership in recent years after the company had failed to compensate for the loss of revenue with mergers and acquisitions.

As a result, industry analysts have speculated that AZ may become a takeover target for one of pharma’s biggest companies.

A merger of GSK and AZ, the two largest pharma companies in the UK, would provide big cost savings. It led one GSK shareholder to raise the issue with the Chief Executive claiming it would be more effective than the recent $2.6bn offer for Human Genome Sciences.

Sir Andrew said GSK believes it can “deliver an extraordinary return to shareholders through this acquisition. I think we waited until exactly the right moment to make this offer, but nonetheless this is a compelling offer for shareholders at HGS to consider,” he said.

The $13 per share offer was rejected by HGS – who have now instructed Goldman Sachs and Credit Suisse to help explore strategic alternatives to GSK’s bid. Sir Andrew declined to comment on whether he had made contact with HGS’ management since GSK’s offer was rejected.

Both GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) and Eli Lilly are investing in new pharmaceutical research facilities in the UK.

GSK has provided £12m to help fund a new sustainable chemistry research facility, focusing on pharmaceutical research, at Nottingham University.

Lilly has launched new neuroscience research facilities at its Erl Wood R&D campus in Surrey, at a cost of £5.4m.

Both initiatives reflect the industry’s renewed confidence in partnership with the academic sector, triggered in part by the new ‘patent box’ legislation.

Known as the GlaxoSmithKline Carbon-Neutral Centre for Sustainable Chemistry, the new building at Nottingham University is intended to stimulate collaborations with other institutions and industry partners.

The new building, scheduled for completion in 2014, will be carbon-neutral, made from natural materials and rely on renewable energy sources.

Sir Andrew Witty, CEO of GSK, said: “The carbon-neutral laboratory will help affirm the UK as a global hub for the future of the life sciences industry. This is an opportunity to invest further in science in the UK, rethink how we approach the drug discovery process and play a role in contributing to environmental stewardship.”

“This development will be transformational in several ways,” commented Professor David Greenaway, Vice-Chancellor of the university. “The building will break new ground in sustainable construction, while the centre of excellence will shape the future of drug discovery.”

The initiative was praised by David Willetts, Minister for Universities and Science. “This new laboratory is an excellent example of collaboration between universities and industry,” he said. “It shows how businesses can benefit from the knowledge and expertise of our world-leading research base and will help keep us at the very forefront of life sciences.”

Eli Lilly’s new research facilities at Erl Wood will house 130 staff, many already employed at the site.

The investment reflects Lilly’s aim of strengthening its neuroscience portfolio, especially for the treatment of Alzheimer’s disease.

Dr Jan Lundberg, President of Lilly Research Laboratories, commented: “The UK is a great place to do bioscience research. Not only does the UK benefit from have a strong research base, the government is also able to maintain a stable pricing and reimbursement system.

“As well as financial incentives for R&D, this demonstrates that the UK government has a commitment to maintain its position as a global leader in attracting pharmaceutical investment.”

Lilly’s involvement in neuroscience research goes back two decades. The company’s drug solanezumab, currently in phase III development, has potential to slow the progression of Alzheimer’s disease.

Dr Lundberg also emphasised the importance of partnership between industry and academia. “Collaboration is absolutely essential to ensure innovative new medicines reach patients,” he said. “The science behind drug discovery is becoming more challenging.”