Yesterday we were invited to sit in and meet the CEO of GSK, Andrew Witty, as he announced the new GlaxoSmithKline Open Innovation Strategy To Aid Poor Countries. The following entry is by one of our new bloggers, Sarah Searle (@sarahsearle on twitter) from the Johns Hopkins International Health program:

“Big Pharma as a Catalyst for Change”: GSK “Open Innovation” strategy

It’s estimated that one-third of the world’s population go without essential drugs–often drugs for treating diseases that disproportionately affect the world’s poorest. The pharmaceutical world proves to be especially difficult to navigate for those seeking to provide such medicines to underserved populations, however. Pharmaceutical science is a field with billions of dollars in R&D, ironclad patents and intellectual property rights that are prohibitive to making drugs available to the poor. Andrew Witty, CEO of GlaxoSmithKline, claims that he’s looking to change this nature of big pharma, in the same way that the open source movement has revolutionized the tech world.

I love the word “innovation” combined with anything related to global health, so the prospect of sitting in on a blogger’s roundtable with GlaxoSmithKline CEO Andrew Witty was exciting enough just from the topic at hand: “Breaking Down Barriers to Innovation and Access to Medicines in the Developing World.”

The ante was upped in a press conference this morning, when Andrew Witty announced GSK’s “Open Innovation” strategy to make drugs more available and break down barriers to access. This strategy includes several components.

“Open Lab” initiative
$8 million in seed funding has been provided establish an “Open Lab” at GlaxoSmithKline’s research facility in Spain. As many as 60 scientists from around the world will be able to work at this lab, which will be devoted to research for drugs that target diseases of the developing world.

13,500 malaria-combating compounds in the public domain
This is perhaps the most exciting announcement. GlaxoSmithKline has been collaborating for years with PATH and other organizations in the development of a malaria vaccine. Scientists at GSK have screened all compounds that have ever been created in their labs, and identified 13,500 compounds that successfully combat P. faciparum, the deadliest form of malaria. The big news? The chemical structures and other recorded data regarding these compounds will be open sourced, in hopes that malaria vaccine research will be accelerated.

New pricing model for GSK’s malaria vaccine candidate
GlaxoSmithKline is in the process of developing the world’s most advanced candidate for a malaria vaccine—it’s the only vaccine in Phase III clinical trials, and could be available to the public as early as 2012. Maintaining that a tiered pricing model simply isn’t feasible for a drug which is needed almost exclusively by the world’s poor, Witty announced a pricing model for the vaccine which covers the cost of the vaccine with a marginal return for GSK, all of which will supposedly be channeled back into R&D for “next-generation” malaria vaccines.

It goes without saying that some present at the roundtable were wary of the corporate world’s ability to selflessly decide change the mechanics of drug information and pricing in order to benefit the world’s poor. Witty has struck a nice balance between acknowledging that GSK is a profit-driven company but maintaining that he strives to keep a “restless” socially-conscious agenda.

And let’s be honest—GSK won’t be suffering much financially with this move. First of all, the malaria drug market isn’t very competitive to begin with, because of the very fact that it is a poor person’s disease. Secondly, GSK is already the developer of the leading candidate for a malaria vaccine. It’s unlikely that, even with the compound information made publicly available, anyone can come up with a vaccine to rival GSK’s in any short amount of time.

Indeed, as Witty acknowledged, making drugs and drug knowledge more universally available is an investment in the future. Drugs will not be provided for free, he stressed, but rather provided at a marginal price that won’t completely alienate other pharmaceutical companies from healthy competition for lifesaving drugs.

Regardless of motivation, it’s refreshing to see big pharma recognizing the issues of access to medicines for the world’s poor. Moreover, Witty’s emphasis on being in step with progressive intellectual property movements is laudable. Whether or not GSK’s initiatives will stimulate other pharmaceutical companies to follow suit remains to be seen.

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