BioWorld International Correspondent

DUBLIN, Ireland - GlaxoSmithKline plc is receiving subsidies from two Irish state agencies to enter a €13.7 million (US$17.5 million) research collaboration on gastrointestinal disease at the Alimentary Pharmabiotic Centre at University College Cork (UCC).

The initiative will create 21 research positions at the APC, which already houses about 120 staff, said center director Fergus Shanahan, who also is professor of medicine at UCC.

It will encompass "blue skies" research on irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) and inflammatory bowel disease (IBD), with the aim of improving understanding of patient phenotypes "to be better able to classify patients and categorize patients for future drug trials," he said. "That's an area we've made a bit of progress in on our own," he added.

In IBS, a disease with prevalence rates of 10 percent to 15 percent among the general population, existing treatments largely are ineffective and existing methods of classifying the disease, as being constipation- or diarrhea-predominant, are inadequate.

"There is an awful lot of noise in it because a lot of people are being branded by that label," Shanahan said. "We think they merge into each other."

The APC already is investigating differing cytokine profiles and stress responses under the control of the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis that IBS patients exhibit. The ultimate aim is to develop biomarkers that will provide a rationale for stratifying patients for drug testing and treatment.

London-based GSK also will gain access to in vitro and in vivo tools and model systems developed at GSK for identifying and studying drug leads. The APC also will become involved in human trials of GSK drug candidates.

"This is not work being done for GSK. This is work being done with GSK," Shanahan said.

IDA Ireland, the state agency responsible for foreign direct investment, and Science Foundation Ireland (SFI), the country's basic science agency, are both backing the initiative. IDA Ireland has long concentrated on attracting pharmaceutical firms to build manufacturing plants in the country.

More recently, it also has attempted to persuade big pharma to locate R&D functions here, although many such projects are limited to areas such as process development and product development, rather than true drug discovery and development.

SFI established a model for building industry-university research centers, of which the APC was one of the first. That entity was established in 2003 with the participation of Cincinnati-based Procter & Gamble Co. and UCC spinout, Cork-based Alimentary Health Ltd. The APC remains largely focused on the development and application of probiotic bacterial strains to promote gastrointestinal health.

The focus of the GSK collaboration will be on small-molecule drugs, Shanahan said. "It doesn't undermine or compete with what we were doing previously," he said.