Academic collaborations

Partnering with academic researchers is an important part of our research and development activities. Find out how we work with academic institutions, and what we can offer in terms of mutual benefits to potential research partners.

Why work with us

Forming partnerships with different organisations is a crucial part of our research and development process.

We recognise that collaborations with academic institutions are enormously beneficial to both GSK and our partners. By working together, we are helping to accelerate the discovery and development of new medicines for patients around the world.

We offer our partners access to our expertise from early drug discovery through to the clinic, which in turn is supported by world-class platform capabilities to progress your ideas and turn them into medicines.  We also have a large infrastructure across the world, operating in 114 countries.

Find out what our partners say about working with us.

Discovery Partnerships with Academia

If you are an academic researcher with recognised expertise and hoping to turn your innovative research project into a medicine, our Discovery Partnerships with Academia (DPAc) programme could provide the solution.

The programme offers resources to academic researchers who need assistance to develop their ideas. We are looking for projects with a specific and testable hypothesis that would deliver therapeutic benefit to patients. Your proposal can be in any disease area and based on any treatment modality, be it small molecule or biopharmaceutical.

We can help develop projects from the early screening phase to late lead optimisation. We are open to a wide range of possibilities that have progressed beyond the exploratory and technology platform stages.

Financial rewards

Our academic partners receive a financial share in the success of any future medicines. When a project stage is successfully completed, milestone payments will be made to recognise this achievement and support further progression to the next phase of drug discovery. When a project leads to the successful launch of a medicine, financial rewards will be shared through royalty payments.

Through an academic partnership you will:

  • gain a single partner from idea to medicine
  • play a key role in the project, working alongside drug discovery scientists from GSK who will build a team that complements you and your project
  • collaborate with GSK researchers with the skills to meet your needs
  • access state-of-the-art drug discovery platforms from early assay development and compound screening to medicinal chemistry, safety assessment, and drug metabolism and pharmacokinetics (DMPK)
  • benefit from the generation of new research tools which will jump start fruitful new lines of research and high quality publications
  • receive a financial share in the success of any future medicines

Discovery Fast Track Challenge

Do you have a drug discovery concept? Are you a principal investigator or a technology transfer officer affiliated with an academic research institute, college or university? If so, the Discovery Fast Track Challenge is for you.

Tell us about your concept. Our expert panel of judges will evaluate each submission to select winners. If your concept is chosen, we will collaborate with you to test our compound collection using our pharmacological screening platforms to discover active compounds. We will share key results from the screen to provide you with the best possible chemical probes to interrogate your translational biological assays. In short, you and your concept will be on an accelerated drug discovery path to success.

In 2015, Discovery Fast Track Challenge winner Richard Leduc, PhD, doctorate in clinical sciences and research professor at the Institut de harmacologie de Sherbrooke of the Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences and Research Center of the Centre hospitalier universitaire de Sherbrooke, was offered a formal DPAc collaboration agreement and opportunity to collaborate on developing a potential new medicine for people who suffer from iron overload disorder such as beta-thalassemia or hereditary hemochromatosis. GSK formed a multi-disciplinary team with Leduc and colleagues to perform screening using both high throughput screening and encoded library technologies against Leduc’s target. With Leduc and his team’s expertise in the target, biology and disease, and GSK’s drug discovery expertise, they went from working on expression of the enzyme to discovering hits in less than a year. Learn more about Leduc’s project here.

To receive updates on our next challenge, fill out the Challenge News form on our Discovery Fast Track Challenge website.

Contact us

For more information on what we are looking for, please go to our DPAc website.