GSK produces over 4 billion packs of medicines each year, and this partnership aims to slash the waste, energy, and time required to make them. The problem is that discovering and manufacturing a new drug is staggeringly inefficient. Chemists often synthesise hundreds of candidate molecules to find one that works, using reactions that generate large amounts of chemical waste and rely on scarce or toxic metals. Scaling up from a gram in the lab to tonnes in a factory typically forces compromises that reduce performance. This project tackles those bottlenecks head-on. If it succeeds, the impact will be felt in two ways. First, patients could get transformative medicines faster and at lower cost. Second, the pharmaceutical supply chain—a system most people never see—would become far more sustainable. Using AI to predict which molecules to make could cut the number of lab syntheses by an order of magnitude. New catalysts and electrochemical reactions would replace carcinogenic reagents and expensive metals like palladium with cheaper nickel. A digital design toolset, coupled with 3D printing, would allow engineers to build bespoke reactors that operate at peak efficiency from the start, rather than adapting off-the-shelf equipment.
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GSK is a global healthcare company that discovers, develops and manufactures medicines to treat a range of conditions including: respiratory diseases, cancer, heart disease, epilepsy, bacterial and viral infections (such as HIV and lupus), and skin conditions like psoriasis. GSK makes over 4 billion packs of medicines each year, with the goal of playing its part in meeting some of society's biggest healthcare challenges. Alongside a mission to provide transformative medicines to patients, GSK continually seeks to improve the efficiency and sustainability of our processes across the discovery, manufacturing, and delivery components of our supply chain. Indeed, GSK are committed to ambitious sustainability goals by 2050 that can only be achieved by making existing and future medicines via better routes, driving innovation all the way from the first design of the molecule through to patients in the clinic. This Prosperity Partnership aims to build on existing vibrant collaborations between GSK and the Universities of Nottingham and Strathclyde. The strengths of each partner will be leveraged to deliver a new suite of methods and approaches to tackle some of the major challenges in the discovery, development, and manufacture of medicines. Our vision is to increase efficiency in terms of atoms, energy, and time; resulting in transformative medicines at lower costs, reduced waste production, and shorter manufacturing routes. Key challenge areas, or themes, covered in our partnership include: 1. The development and application of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning to the efficient identification of next generation medicines: in Drug Discovery, many hundreds of candidate structures are designed, prepared, and tested to find the molecule with the right profile to take into the clinic. The development of AI informed decision making has the potential to deliver huge savings by minimising the number of compounds that need to be made at this stage. The software developed will incorporate green chemistry principles with the goal that the chemical methods employed are as efficient and sustainable as possible. 2. Next generation catalysis and synthesis: Chemists seeking to discover new medicines need new reactions that will allow them to make and investigate structures that are currently difficult, or even impossible, to make. A key objective of this proposal will be to develop new reagents, catalysts, and reactions to facilitate the more efficient preparation of drug-like molecules to accelerate drug discovery. Similarly, we will develop new ways of performing some of the most common chemical transformations in the synthesis of medicines whilst avoiding the use of carcinogenic reagents. 3. Sustainable processes that deliver efficiency and transition to scale-up from grammes to kilogrammes. Currently under-utilised approaches, such as electrochemistry, will be explored for their ability to catalyse reactions with cheaper and less environmentally impactful metals, such as replacing palladium with nickel. 4. A new Digital Design toolset for equipment will enable Digital Manufacturing of novel pharmaceutical processing equipment. Current development relies on existing traditional vessels and flow reactors that compromise our ability to deliver processes that operate at optimal performance. The research will couple advanced process models, state-of-the-art experimentation, and 3-D printing/additive manufacturing technologies to revolutionise how we develop, scale up, and operate chemical processes to supply new medicines. Integration of the projects and the expertise from the three partner institutions, and the successful prosecution of our research objectives, will make a major contribution to the wider pharmaceutical sector and, indeed, GSK's mission of discovering and developing transformative medicines faster to help people do more, feel better, and live longer.
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