GSK and Online Communities Create Unique Alliance to Stimulate Open Source Drug Discovery for Malaria

 GSK becomes first company to freely share chemical structures on 13,500 molecules from its compound library

Burlingame, CA/ GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) had teamed up with leading public-domain data providers European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI), the U.S. National Library of Medicine (NLM) and the US-based informatics service provider Collaborative Drug Discovery (CDD) to make freely available key scientific information on more than 13,500 compounds that could ultimately lead to new treatments for malaria.
The release of this data marks the first time that a pharmaceutical company has made available the structures of so many compounds and is made possible through the collaboration of the web hosts and their specialist research tools, which will be available at no cost to researchers. The information, which is hosted on websites regularly used by researchers, includes high quality scientific data about the molecules from GSK’s own compound library which have demonstrated potency against the most deadly malaria parasite, P. falciparum.

About the data

The data contains the ‘hits’ or results from a screening of the 2 million compounds in GSK’s compound library to determine the effect of these compounds on the malaria parasite. The screening project identified ~13,500 compounds that showed strong inhibition on the parasite.

Kinase inhibitors constituted a large proportion of the molecules with previously known activity and now identified as antimalarial hits. The data includes the chemical families that GSK is currently researching for this indication and the ‘mechanisms of action’ for those compounds which the company has previously tested for other indications.

Most of the compound structures identified have been classified as capable of being converted into medicine.

The current microbiological information for the compounds and the structures have been put on online resources that are easily accessed by researchers. The EMBL-EBI site has been constructed so that scientists globally can add their data to the information there, with access free to all. The value of the release of information is enhanced by the collaboration of the web hosts and the specialist research tools on the site, that are being made available to researchers at no cost to them.

This initiative together with the publication of negative results will accelerate the malaria drug screenings and improve the treatments in a faster way