Over the last five years GSK has made major commitments to academic institutions in the UK as the company recognises the importance of engaging with UK academia in developing effective medicines to support the health of society.

The primary academic Project Partners in TTPS – the Universities of Oxford, Cambridge and Southampton - are key collaborators with GSK in these initiatives, with combined GSK investment of over £150M.

Much of this research uses novel experimental technologies and data aggregation approaches to help understand the role of the immune system in maintaining health and healthy aging, leveraging that knowledge to infer novel therapeutic targets.

Oxford

GSK and the University of Oxford have formed a large, multi-year, multi-programme Alliance. The Institute for Molecular and Computational Medicine works to identify indicators and predictors of disease and use them to accelerate the most promising areas for drug discovery, particularly in the neurodegeneration space. The GO-PRECISE programme is focussing on the development of novel approaches for cancer vaccines. The Experimental Medicines Collaboration is studying and treating immune mediated inflammatory diseases. The Modelling-Informed Medicine Centre is applying mathematical modelling to de-risk and accelerate drug discovery and development. CeBAM is developing of new AI tools and methods for medical and biopharmaceutical research.

Southampton

Collaborative work between GSK and University of Southampton seeks to integrate and develop methods for evaluating antibody structure/function relationships relating to flexibility and affinity. Current methods involve crystallography, small angle x-ray scattering, and molecular dynamics simulations. New methods could accelerate the modelling of these behaviours computationally. Work is being undertaken to integrate other data sources such as Ion Mobility-Mass Spectrometry and Collision Induced Unfolding, using ML/AI to identify signatures of resulting biological behaviours to help refine current and planned GSK antibody therapeutics.

Cambridge

GSK has a long history of collaboration with the University of Cambridge. We have recently established the Cambridge-GSK Translational Immunology Collaboration (CG-TIC) which brings together GSK’s expertise in the science of the immune system, AI and clinical development with Cambridge’s complementary expertise. GSK is investing more than £50 million in the CG-TIC to further accelerate research and development in kidney and respiratory diseases. In addition GSK has established a £10 million, five year collaboration that brings together advanced genomics and single cell technologies to further our understanding of health and disease.

Collaboration

These existing GSK-funded research programmes have built a network of collaborations that provide an exceptionally fertile environment in which to train the TTPS students with opportunities to work between institutions and across disciplines. The research of over 80 academic principal investigators is supported by GSK, working with over 50 GSK scientists, giving a potential supervisor pool of 130 leading international scientists supporting you.

GSK has a strong track record in supporting doctoral education with 220 PhD students currently funded by GSK and over 100 PhD completing their training in the last 3 years.