GlaxoSmithKline and the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, have a 50-50 partnership in the new company. These sorts of public-private science efforts are tricky to manage, but likely to grow as government funding of research drops, experts say.
A blood cell infected with HIV.
NIAID / Via Flickr: niaid
A large drug company and a public university have launched a new company with the goal of not just treating, but curing HIV.
British health care giant GlaxoSmithKline has pledged $20 million over five years and roughly 10 of its scientists to the new effort. Its partner, the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, will contribute about 40 researchers, as well as access to patients at its hospital for clinical trials and laboratory space on its medical campus.
Companies and universities routinely collaborate on scientific research. They'll license each other's technologies, and universities will even create startups to commercialize the ideas of its researchers. But the new company, named Qura Therapeutics, appears to be the first example of public and private science going into business together and splitting future profits equally.
The partnership is especially notable because it's not based on any specific invention or technology. "This sounds very open-ended, and I think this part of it is kind of unusual," Kenneth Kaitin, director of the Tufts Center for the Study of Drug Development, told BuzzFeed News.
The cultures of big pharma and academia are strikingly different, Kaitin added, often making it difficult to work out mutually agreeable terms. But with government funding of scientific research in a decade-long slump, Kaitin says we're likely to see the private sector get more involved — in all sorts of ways. "Nothing is surprising to me anymore in terms of these relationships."
HIV/AIDS patient Michael Willis of Baltimore sorts out his medicine in 1998.
Roberto Borea / Associated Press / Via apimages.com
The first approved drug for HIV, azidothymidine or AZT, was patented in 1985 by Burroughs Wellcome, which was subsequently acquired by GSK.
At UNC-Chapel Hill, molecular biologist David Margolis and his colleagues have made headlines for their strategy to root out HIV from its many hiding spots (known as "latent reservoirs") in the body — even in patients already treated with antiretroviral therapy.
With that line of research, "what was once provocative and unthinkable became mainstream: let's try and cure AIDS," Myron Cohen, chief of the Division of Infectious Diseases at UNC-Chapel Hill, told BuzzFeed News.
That scientific strategy, informally known as "shock and kill," will be at the center of the GSK-UNC collaboration.
The leaders of the new effort recognize that their initial investment is fairly small, on the scale of what it takes to develop a new drug. They hope to be a catalyst for more funding — from the government and, perhaps, from other companies — later on.
"Clearly $20 million is not enough to get a cure," Zhi Hong, head of the Infectious Diseases Therapy Area Unit at GSK, told BuzzFeed News. But "it's good enough to get things started."
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