GSK and partners set up big data project
pharmafile | March 27, 2014 | News story | Medical Communications, Research and Development, Sales and Marketing | Big Data, European Bioinformatics Institute, GSK, Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, cttv
GlaxoSmithKline, the European Bioinformatics Institute and the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute have come together to launch an open access research project that will expand on the capabilities of big data in creating new medicines.
Called the Centre for Therapeutic Target Validation (CTTV), this new initiative will be based in the Cambridge, UK technology cluster and aims to address a number of diseases.
GSK says that the three will also share its data openly in the ‘interests of accelerating drug discovery’. The CTTV aims to use the almost daily advances in cutting-edge genetic research to help researchers when exploring how to find new medicines.
It will be supported by up to 50 researchers drawn from the three founding organisations, and will be based on the Wellcome Trust Genome Campus in Hinxton, Essex.
Reports from Business Weekly suggest that GSK is putting ‘several million’ pounds into the initiative to fund an initial wave of projects. The three founders say they also hope to attract financial interest from other companies and academic institutions over time.
“I fully expect others to join,” Patrick Vallance, GSK’s head of pharmaceuticals research and development, told Reuters. “But it seemed sensible to get started right away rather than spend two or three years trying to get lots of other people involved.”
Big data
Currently, nearly nine out of every ten compounds entering clinical trials fail to progress into a marketed drug, and this can often occur because the biological target for a drug is not well understood.
This new project aims to help solve this problem via ‘target validation’ which clearly defines the role that a biological process plays in disease before developing a new drug.
The new approach aims to complement existing methods of target validation, including analysis of published research on known biological processes, pre-clinical animal modelling and studying disease epidemiology.
Scientists from the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute will contribute their understanding of the role of genetics in health and disease, and EMBL-EBI – a company focussed on the analysis and dissemination of biological data – will provide bioinformatics-led insights on the data and use its capabilities to integrate huge streams of different varieties of experimental data.
GSK will contribute expertise in disease biology, translational medicine and drug discovery.
A cornerstone of the collaboration is the agreement that sequence data and information gathered within the CTTV will be shared to benefit the broader scientific community.
Dr Ewan Birney, associate director and senior scientist at EMBL-EBI, has been appointed as interim head of the CTTV. He says: “The Centre for Therapeutic Target Validation is a transformative collaboration to improve the process of discovering new medicines.”
“The pre-competitive nature of the centre is critical: the collaboration of EMBL-EBI and the Sanger Institute with GSK allows us to make the most of commercial R&D practice, but the data and information will be available to everyone.
“It is truly exciting to apply so many different areas of expertise, from data integration to genomics, to the challenge of creating better medicines.”
Ben Adams
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