GSK has announced a new initiative to share its compounds to help in the fight against malaria.

GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) has launched a revolutionary project in the fight against malaria, making public the details of 13,500 of its malaria-fighting compounds to help scientists around the world in the quest for treatments.

The compounds will be released via a dedicated website, while GSK will also make available to other non-GSK scientists one of its laboratories in Spain, in an effort to accelerate treatments for other tropical diseases. The ‘Open Lab’ can potentially be used by 60 scientists, with access to highly advanced equipment.

Andrew Witty, GSK’s CEO, is due to make these landmark announcements in New York today. He told the Guardian newspaper in advance of the speech that companies should exceed society’s expectations, not simply meet them: “To my knowledge nobody’s ever put confirmed-hit structures into the public domain. Universities have done stuff like this but on a much smaller scale.

“I think it’s a significant contribution to give scientists around the world 13,500 new opportunities to start research.”

The news follows GSK’s 2008 Corporate Social Responsibility report, published last year, which announced the company’s plans to create a ‘patent pool’. This would allow everyone to access more than 500 granted patents and 300 pending applications in an effort to “help others to develop potential medicines for neglected diseases”.

According to the World Health Organisation (WHO), about half the world’s population is at risk from malaria, while in Africa a child dies every 30 seconds from the disease.

Medicines for Malaria Venture (MMV) is one of GSK’s partners. Dr Timothy Wells, MMV’s Chief Scientific Officer, said: “At MMV we are proud to be associated with GSK’s new initiatives, which have the potential to dramatically alter the way the world approaches research and development for neglected diseases.

“By sharing the data from the MMV-GSK screening collaboration, the research community can start to build up a public repository of knowledge that should be as powerful as the human genome databases and could set a new trend to revolutionise the urgent search for new medicines to tackle malaria.”