GSK and Google parent forge $715 million bioelectronic medicines firm - iData Insights (All about Pharma & Healthcare)

GSK and Google parent forge $715 million bioelectronic medicines firm - iData Insights (All about Pharma & Healthcare)

GlaxoSmithKline and Google parent Alphabet's life sciences unit are creating a new company focused on fighting diseases by targeting electrical signals in the body, jump-starting a novel field of medicine called bioelectronics.

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.

GlaxoSmithKline and Alphabet unit Verily (formerly Google Life Sciences) made a splash yesterday when they announced the launch of Galvani Bioelectronics, a company that will build upon GSK’s three years of work to develop tiny nerve-altering devices that might one day be used instead of drugs to treat a variety of diseases. The two companies will invest up to £540 million (more than $700 million) over the next seven years, they said, employing 30 scientists at GSK’s research center in the U.K. and at Verily in South San Francisco.

So what, exactly, is bioelectronic medicine? The idea of this new branch of life sciences is to place devices directly into the body to alter the activity of specific nerves, in turn sending signals to organs and, ideally, reversing a particular disease state. In 2013, GSK launched a $50 million venture fund to foster the development of bioelectronic devices. (For more on bioelectronics, see the video from GSK below.)

Moncef Slaoui, who chairs GSK’s global vaccines group and will chair the board of the new company, says Verily will be the ideal partner for developing biolectronic devices because it provides GSK with much-needed technology expertise. “When we started to conceptualize bioelectronic medicine as a new avenue for discovery, we realized very quickly that it wasn’t our forte to design nanochips, wireless communications, big data analytics” and other vital electronic components, Slaoui says. GSK approached just about every major technology player looking for a strategic partner, he adds, but most were skittish about the regulatory challenges of developing micro-devices that would be implanted in the body. “They had interest but not really enthusiasm,” Slaoui says. “In contrast, with Verily, we had immediate alignment on the vision, the integration between biology and technology and the risk-taking and capital allocation needed to drive this concept all the way through to actual products.”

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