UK Giants Team Up For Drug Screening

Glaxo Wellcome and SmithKline Beecham are to collaborate on the genomic sequencing of a number of important pathogenic micro-organisms in a bid to develop new drugs to treat emerging and re-emerging infectious diseases. Although the two companies will work together on the sequencing, they will use the resulting data independently, and in direct competition, in their own R&D programs.

Although the two companies have significant anti-infective research programs, they hope that by combining their resources they will shorten the time to sequencing the genomes they are interested in, at a lower cost than if they worked independently.