With Academic Collaborators, GSK To Plug For ‘Electroceuticals’

Article preview from Start-Up - April, 2013

GlaxoSmithKline will fund nonprofit labs across several biomedical and engineering disciplines and offer a $1 million cash prize to probe the role of neural activity in disease. The goal is to build new devices that treat a range of diseases “in their own electrical language.”

 

 With Academic Collaborators, GSK To Plug For ‘Electroceuticals’

Article preview from Start-Up - April, 2013

Do a web search for the term “electroceuticals,” and many of the results tout a form of alternative medicine. GlaxoSmithKline PLC is angling to make the term a lot more mainstream.

A new funding initiative from the drug giant aims to back academic scientists who are trying to answer early questions about the possibility of using extremely focused electrical impulses to modulate the neural signals that control vital organs. GSK unveiled the project in the April 10 issue of Nature; the international drug firm will start fielding proposals immediately and fund up to 40 researchers across 20 academic and other nonprofit institutions for one year.

The longer-term goal is to do with miniscule electric pulses what drugmakers currently try to do with biologics and small molecules: control blood pressure, cytokine production, glucose function, or any number of biological mechanisms that lead to disease when out of whack. “Correcting disorders with treatment in their own electrical language” is how the authors of the Nature paper describe their goal.

Before treatments come to light, however, there are years of work ahead in mapping the neural activity associated with various diseases. Kristoffer Famm, PhD, the vice president in charge of GSK’s new bioelectronics group, says the funding, to be parceled out to two researchers per lab, is aimed at jump-starting the mapping projects or building upon works in progress. GSK is not revealing the amount it has earmarked for the 40-researchers phase of the project. But at the end of 2013, GSK expects to convene a meeting and ask researchers to zero in on a key hurdle the field needs to overcome; GSK will then put up $1 million as a prize to the group that solves the problem.

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