GSK puts anti-malarial compounds in the public domain

Nearly a year ago I blogged about GlaxoSmithKlein’s plans to create a patent pool for neglected diseases. In a speech tomorrow, CEO Andrew Witty will announce that the company is ready to publish details of 13,500 chemical compounds with the potential to cure malaria, an affliction that kills at least one million children every year in sub-Saharan Africa.

The Guardian has an exclusive interview with Witty. Here’s a clip.

“I think it’s a significant contribution to give scientists around the world 13,500 new opportunities to start research.”

“It’s trying to create a permissiveness around scientific research in an area where we know the marketplace isn’t going to stimulate massive research,” he said.

“Given that there is only a handful of big companies who focus on malaria, this is a chance to get thousands of researchers involved – just like software companies encourage thousands of people to contribute their new ideas for software – and we’ll see what comes of it.”

The Guardian is also reporting that Witty will announce an $8m fund to pay for scientists to explore these chemicals or others in an “open lab” within its research centre at Tres Cantos, Spain.

Witty has consistently talked up GSK’s commitment to making life saving medicines more accessible to the poor. And, to be fair, GSK has implemented price cuts for drugs in the poorest countries and promised to locally reinvest 20% of any profits GSK made there. But on the question of whether this will fundamentally change the way the industry addresses public health problems, there is cause for skepticism.

GSK’s concessions in developing countries have cost them little and the company has so far resisted calls to extend its new penchant for openness to treatments for more lucrative HIV drugs. Moreover, in Witty’s announcement nearly a year ago he laid out an ambitious plan to create an industry wide pool of intellectual property to help speed up the development of a wider range of treatments for diseases that have long been neglected by big pharmaceutical companies. GSK opened up a portion of its library, but nobody in the industry followed.

That’s not entirely surprising. Pharmaceutical companies rarely share any information, let alone collaborate openly on drug development. Arguably, such a patent pool would be more palatable for competitors if it were hosted by a non-profit foundation or a university (see Drugs for Neglected Diseases, for example). These arguments aside, if Witty’s insistence that his company push the boundaries helps raise public expectations about what constitutes responsible industry behaviour then at least something of value will have been accomplished.