13,500

Jan 20th, 2010 2:55 PM UTC
By Chris Scott

That’s the number of potentially life-saving malaria compounds that will be made freely available to the public, Andrew Witty announced today. Witty, who is the Chief Executive of GlaxoSmithKline, elaborated on the details during a blogger round-table discussion that I took part in this afternoon.

Over the last year, GlaxoSmithKline has been combing through a library of over 2 million molecules in search of any that could potentially inhibit the malaria parasite P.falciparum. It took 5 scientists a year to narrow it down to 13,500 such compounds that Witty and others believe could lead to new malaria medicine. GSK intends to make this data freely available to the public in what they’re calling “the first time that a pharmaceutical company has made public the structures of so many of its compounds.”

The potential of such a move on GSK’s part is fascinating. During his announcement at the Council on Foreign Relations, Witty elaborated:

Let me conclude on a different but related issue and talk about the importance of vaccines in the developing countries. GSK is one of the world’s largest suppliers of vaccines. Eighty per cent of all the vaccine we produce goes to developing countries.

Forty percent of all the vaccine we produce is supplied to GAVI. And over the past year, we became the first company to have WHO prequalified vaccines for pneumococcal disease, rotavirus and H1N1 pandemic flu. Pneumococcal disease is a great example of partnership. GSK is likely to be the first company to supply the $1.5 billion Advanced Market Commitment. The AMC is the largest financing mechanism ever designed for a single vaccine and will dramatically increase sustainable access to pneumococcal vaccines with prices at a fraction of the cost paid by industrialized nations.

We are also – importantly – on the cusp of completing the world’s first malaria vaccine, which is now in late-stage trials in seven African countries. Of course we don’t actually have a registered vaccine yet, and we are in no way taking anything for granted.

But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be thinking now about how we ensure this vaccine – should it make it – gets to all those that could benefit from it.

You can read more about GSK’s work to find a malaria vaccine here. We’ll be following the progress of this project in coming weeks and months. Stay tuned.

TAGS: Malaria