GSK unites with CRISPR pioneer Doudna
British-based pharmaceutical company GSK has entered into a five-year collaboration with the U niversity of California to explore how gene mutations cause disease and accelerate drug discovery.
Announced yesterday, June 13, the collaboration will see the establishment of a state-of-the-art laboratory for CRISPR technologies, the Laboratory for Genomics Research (LGR). GSK will pay up to $67 million for the lab, which will be jointly run by the university.
The lab will be led by researchers including Jennifer Doudna of the University of California Berkeley (UCB), a co-inventor of CRISPR gene-editing technology, Jonathan Weissman of University of California San Francisco (UCSF), a pioneer of CRISPR screening technology, and Hal Barron, chief scientific officer and president, research and development (R&D), GSK.
The LGR will explore how gene mutations cause disease and develop new technologies using CRISPR to rapidly accelerate the discovery of new medicines, according to a statement from GSK.
Doudna said: “Over the last seven years, CRISPR has transformed academic research, but until the LGR, we haven’t had a focused effort to catalyse the kind of research we know will lead to new innovation using this CRISPR tool.”
With a focus on immunology, oncology and neuroscience, the laboratory will be based near the UCSF Mission Bay campus in San Francisco, and GSK’s artificial intelligence and machine learning group will be involved in building the necessary computational pipelines to analyse all the data.
The LGR aims to automate existing CRISPR approaches so that this work can be done at scale.
Barron said: “Technology is key to our innovation strategy at GSK, and CRISPR is one of the most important technologies of our time.
“With the expertise of Jennifer and Jonathan helping to steer the LGR, I am confident the lab will significantly advance our scientific understanding of the relationship between genes and disease to help find better medicines faster.”
Tools developed in the lab will be described in published papers, subject to IP provisions, and will be available for use by other academic and non-profit labs.
Weissman added: “One of our key goals is to advance the field overall and make these tools as broadly available as possible. The LGR screening centre will enable labs at UCSF and Berkeley, and having access to it will give our scientists opportunities to advance their research in ways that would be very hard for them to do in their own labs.”
The LGR builds on GSK’s existing data-driven collaborations with companies in the genetics space, such as its partnership with DNA testing company 23andMe.
In July 2018, GSK revealed a new approach to R&D focusing on science related to the immune system, the use of genetics and investments in advanced technologies.
The 23andMe four-year collaboration, which saw GSK buy a $300 million stake in the company, is focusing on developing new medicines, using human genetics as the basis for discovery.
Did you enjoy reading this story? Sign up to our free newsletters and get stories like this sent straight to your inbox.
