Innovation UK > News > Innovation News > GSK puts malaria drugs in public domain

GlaxoSmithKline will be putting into the public domain thousands of potential drugs that might cure malaria.

Andrew Witty, the Chief Executive of Glaxo-SmithKline, will say in a major speech that multinational drug companies have to balance social responsibility alongside the need to make profits for their shareholders.

According to today?s Guardian newspaper, GSK will publish details of 13,500 chemical compounds from its own library that have potential to act against the parasite that causes malaria in sub-Saharan Africa, killing at least one million children every year.

Five investigators spent a year screening the two million compounds in GSK?s library ? its entire collection of potential drugs and possibly the biggest such library in the world.

"We?re deliberately trying to target and stimulate other people into this space," said Witty. ?We are trying to do something that makes a difference for those people who live in the least-developed countries in the world."

Witty will also be announcing an $8m fund to pay for scientists to explore these chemicals or others in an "open lab" within its research centre at Tres Cantos, Spain, which is dedicated to work on malaria and other diseases of the developing world.

Witty was scheduled to disclose the initiatives during a speech to the Council on Foreign Relations in New York on Wednesday.