Stevenage, Hertfordshire. A concrete jungle 20 miles outside the M25, with little to impress passers-by besides a cinema and bowling alley. But hidden within this mass of grey buildings, fast roads and stark lighting is GlaxoSmithKline’s (GSK) research and development (R&D) hub, a state of the art facility which houses thousands of square metres of laboratory, hundreds of world class scientists, and a robot called Baxter.
Here scientists spend their days carefully investigating molecules which could, in the future, cure cancer, treat asthma or eradicate HIV. It doesn’t matter that they might spend their working lives developing drugs which may never be made commercially available, these scientists are endlessly proud of what they do. “The millions of compounds that we archive, format and distribute across GSK worldwide and to our collaborating partners, are an essential part of the early drug discovery process”, says Darren Rimmer, a scientific leader in discovery and supply.
“A medicine starts as an idea in the mind of a chemist or a biologist. We then research it and collect data,” explains Elaine Jones, a medicines development leader in GSK’s respiratory division. “The drug development process can take anywhere between 10 and 12 years from the moment we see a molecule that has promise, to it becoming a medicine. Thousands of scientists, statisticians, regulators, and representatives from across GSK are involved.”