Glaxo and Google in £540m tech tie-up to beat diseases

TWO of the world’s biggest companies, GlaxoSmithKline and Google, are teaming up to make what could be the human body’s smallest life-saving gadgets after today signing a £540 million deal.

Britain’s biggest pharmaceuticals firm, GSK, and Google’s owner Alphabet’s Verily Life Sciences arm are injecting the money over seven years in their new joint venture.

The new company will be based in Stevenage and marks Glaxo’s second major UK investment in a week in a week after pumping £275 million into three UK sites.

Galvani Bioelectronics will create tiny, implantable devices that can modify the body’s nerve signals, potentially treating chronic conditions including arthritis, diabetes and asthma.

Embedded electrical devices are already used in the human body for heart pacemakers and, in the brain, to help Parkinson’s disease.

GSK, whose chief executive Sir Andrew Witty has been trying to move the drugsmaker beyond “white pills and Western markets”, believes it has a head start over its major rivals in bioelectronics.

This is the science of developing medicines using electrical impulses rather than chemicals or proteins, which it began researching in 2012.

Verily’s investment is part of Google’s latest attempt at branching out beyond search. Verily is already working on a smart contact lens with an embedded glucose sensor to monitor diabetes. The new company will be in Stevenage with a second hub in San Francisco, initially employing around 30 scientists, clinicians and engineers. GSK will own 55% of Galvani and Google the rest.

Moncef Slaoui, GSK’s chairman of global vaccines, said. “Bioelectronic medicine’s vision is to correct the irregular patterns found in disease states, using miniaturised devices attached to individual nerves.”

Business Secretary Greg Clark said the deal was a “significant victory for UK business and our global leadership in life sciences”.