Google and Glaxo in implant venture
GLAXOSMITHKLINE has joined forces with Google’s parent company to develop implants that fight chronic diseases such as arthritis, diabetes and asthma by targeting electrical signals in the body.
Britain’s biggest drugs company will hold a 55 per cent stake in Galvani Bioelectronics, which it is forming with Alphabet’s Verily Life Sciences.
The pair will invest up to £540million over seven years into the business, subject to various discovery and development milestones being successfully completed.
The venture, initially employing about 30 scientists, engineers and clinicians, will be based in Glaxo’s global research and development centre in Stevenage, Hertfordshire, with a second research hub at Verily’s facilities in San Francisco. It is Glaxo’s second major boost to the UK economy following the Brexit vote. It also announced plans last week to spend £275million on drug manufacturing. The company has been working since 2012 on bioelectronic medicines, a relatively new scientific field where tiny devices implanted in the body can modify electrical signals that pass along the nerves. The first treatments using these implants, which are about the size of a medical pill but could be smaller than a grain of rice, could be submitted for regulatory approval by about 2023. Glaxo’s global vaccines chairman Moncef Slaoui, pictured, who will chair the new firm, hailed the tie-up as a “crucial step forward in Glaxo’s bioelectronics journey”.
He said: “Many of the processes of the human body are controlled by electrical signals firing between the nervous system and the body’s organs, which may become distorted in many chronic diseases.
“Bioelectronic medicine’s vision is to employ the latest advances in biology and technology to interpret this electrical conversation and to correct the irregular patterns found in diseased states, using miniaturised devices attached to individual nerves.
“If successful, this approach offers the potential for a new therapeutic modality alongside traditional medicines and vaccines.”