GSK sets up biopharma research centre

GlaxoSmithKline today announced details of its seventh Centre of Excellence for Drug Discovery (CEDD), extending the company's new model for pharmaceutical research and development into the biopharmaceutical sphere.

The additional CEDD will concentrate on biopharmaceuticals, a field where GSK is progressing a growing number of assets in its early-stage pipeline. The unit will begin operations by year-end, according to the firm.

GSK has already set up six CEDDs, each of which is dedicated to a specific therapeutic category. In the USA, Anti-bacterials & Host Defence is based in Upper Providence, Cardiovascular, Cancer and Urogenital is centred in Upper Merion and Metabolic, Musculoskeletal & Viral Diseases is at GSK's facility in Research Triangle Park. Meanwhile, in Europe, Neurology is based in Harlow in the UK, while Psychiatry is centred in Verona, Italy, and Respiratory, Inflammation and Respiratory Pathogens as at the firm's Medicines Research Centre in Stevenage, UK.

"The CEDDs that were created at the formation of GSK have enabled sharp productivity gains,"​ said Dr Tadataka Yamada, chairman, R&D at the UK-headquartered company.

"We will now bring the well-defined accountability and entrepreneurial drive that characterise our CEDDs to the promise of our biopharmaceutical portfolio,"​ he noted.

A spokesman for GSK told In-PharmaTechnologist.com that the biopharma CEDD will be headquartered in Stevenage, but will also involve scientists in Upper Merion and Beckenham in the UK. No employees will be poached from other CEDDs, he noted.

All told, the unit will employ around 350 staff under the guidance of Mike Owen, senior vice president of technology development at GSK, and there will be no need to recruit any significant number of additional stuff, he said.

Discussing the rationale behind the move, the spokesman noted that GSK has already made a significant investment in biopharma technologies and has an expanding early-stage pipeline in this sector.

The company's most advanced biopharmaceutical drug is interleukin-18 for immunologically-sensitive malignancies, but this is already in clinical trials and comes under the auspices of another CEDD. For the biopharma CEDD, the key programs are monoclonal antibodies for severe neurological disorders and therapeutic DNA vaccines for cancer and viral infections.