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 Verily Life Sciences - known as Google's life sciences unit until
last year - and Britain's biggest drugmaker will together contribute
540 million pounds ($715 million) over seven years to Galvani
Bioelectronics, they said on Monday.
The new company, owned 55 percent by GSK and 45 percent by Verily,
will be based at GSK's Stevenage research center north of London,
with a second research hub in South San Francisco.
It is GSK's second notable investment in Britain since the country
voted to leave the European Union in June. Last week it announced
plans to spend 275 million pounds on drug manufacturing.
Galvani will develop miniaturized, implantable devices that can
modify electrical nerve signals. The aim is to modulate irregular or
altered impulses that occur in many illnesses.
GSK believes chronic conditions such as diabetes, arthritis and
asthma could be treated using these tiny devices, which consist of a
electronic collar that wraps around nerves.
Kris Famm, GSK's head of bioelectronics research and president of
Galvani, said the first bioelectronic medicines using these implants
to stimulate nerves could be submitted for regulatory approval by
around 2023.
"We have had really promising results in animal tests, where we've
shown we can address some chronic diseases with this mechanism, and
now we are bringing that work into the clinic," he told Reuters.
"Our goal is to have our first medicines ready for regulatory
approval in seven years."
GSK first unveiled its ambitions in bioelectronics in a paper in the
journal Nature three years ago and believes it is ahead of Big
Pharma rivals in developing medicines that use electrical impulses
rather than traditional chemicals or proteins.
The tie-up shows the growing convergence of healthcare and
technology. Verily already has several other medical projects in the
works, including the development of a smart contact lens in
partnership with the Swiss drugmaker Novartis that has an embedded
glucose sensor to help monitor diabetes.
GRAIN OF RICE
Famm said the first generation of implants coming to market would be
around the size of a medical pill but the aim eventually was to make
them as small or smaller than a grain of rice, using the latest
advances in nanotechnology.
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Patients will be treated with keyhole surgery and the hope is that
bioelectronic medicine could provide a one-off treatment,
potentially lasting decades.
Major challenges including making the devices ultra low-power so
that they function reliably deep inside the body.
The idea of treating serious disease with electrical impulses is not
completely new.
Large-scale electrical devices have been used for years as heart
pacemakers and, more recently, deep brain stimulation has been
applied to treat Parkinson's disease and severe depression, while
EnteroMedics last year won U.S. approval for a device to help obese
people control their appetite.
Galvani, however, is taking electrical interventions to the micro
level, using tiny implants to coax insulin from cells to treat
diabetes, for example, or correct muscle imbalances in lung
diseases.
Galvani will initially employ around 30 scientists, engineers and
clinicians.
The company will be chaired by Moncef Slaoui, GSK's vaccines head,
who pioneered the drugmaker's drive into the bioelectronics field.
Slaoui is retiring from GSK next March but will continue to steer
Galvani after that date, a spokesman said.
Galvani will be fully consolidated in GSK's financial statements,
following the model of the group's majority-owned ViiV Healthcare
business, which sells HIV medicines.
(Editing by Susan Thomas and Pravin Char)
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