BioQuarter in milestone GSK deal

GSK, the UK’s biggest drugs developer, will make an up-front payment to the university, which will then receive further cash at key points during the project and a share of any profits made from the new medicines.

The BioQuarter – which brings together NHS Lothian, Scottish Enterprise and the university to develop spin-out companies and turn scientific research into cash – thinks the deal will help it to land other contracts with big drugs firms. Diane Harbison, head of business development at the BioQuarter, said: “This is a real feather in Edinburgh’s cap. As well as the cash involved, the exchange of knowledge will be of benefit to both our academics and staff at GSK.

“We hope this will be the first of many collaborations. We also think the deal will help us to attract other companies, whether big players or smaller companies that are just starting up.”

The deal has been hailed as a “real endorsement” for the Scottish life sciences sector. Graeme Boyle, director of Nexxus, the Scottish life sciences networking body, said: “This is a big deal. GSK is an important player in the drug development market. This is also important because it demonstrates that there is support for the BioQuarter project and its collaborations. There will be more deals like this in the pipeline for Scotland.”

GSK already has manufacturing facilities at Irvine and Montrose, which together employ about 670 staff and are estimated to contribute about £80 million to the Scottish economy. The factories make antibiotics and drugs to combat HIV and heart disease.

The BioQuarter was dealt a blow last year when Alexandria Real Estate Equities – the US biotech park specialist brought in as a partner to build an “incubator” for start-ups next to the Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh and Edinburgh University’s College of Medicine – scaled back its international investment.

But the public sector bodies involved with the project pressed on with the £24m incubator building. Scottish Enterprise is currently fitting out the facility, which is expected to be ready for use in March.

The BioQuarter said it was in talks with a “number of companies” to use the site and that Alexandria still had the option to build other facilities around the incubator.

Pancreatitis is an inflammation of the pancreas, the organ that sits between the stomach and intestines and makes the chemicals used to digest food.

Acute pancreatitis – which comes on abruptly over the course of a couple of days and causes severe pain in the abdomen – affects about five in every 100,000 people in the UK each year, taking up 150,000 days in hospital beds.

In America, acute pancreatitis and multiple organ failure costs the healthcare system £83bn a year. A team of drug developers from GSK’s Academic Discovery Performance Unit (ADPU) will work with Dr Scott Webster and Damian Mole from Edinburgh University’s College of Medicine. Mole said: “Severe acute pancreatitis can be expensive to treat as patients require intensive care. Despite treatment, up to a quarter of people will die from an attack. By teaming up with GSK, we have the opportunity to turn our science into a medicine.”

Webster added: “This is a great example of translating academic research. The alliance brings together our collective expertise in target biology and drug discovery to tackle an enormous unmet medical need.”

GSK, which was created in 2000 through the merger of Glaxo Wellcome and Smith Kline Beecham, said its ADPU will form ten partnerships with universities through its Discovery Partnerships With Academia programme. The deal with Edinburgh University is the third such partnership.

GSK’s third-quarter trading update on Wednesday is expected to reveal that turnover was flat at £6.9bn but that underlying profits increased by 2 per cent to £2bn. The growth is tipped to have come from vaccines and also asthma and smokers’ cough treatment Advair in the US, where higher prices in the US will offset a squeeze in Europe.