Glaxo offers free malaria research, vaccine nears

NEW YORK/LONDON (Reuters) - GlaxoSmithKline Plc hopes to seek approval by 2012 for its experimental malaria vaccine and said on Wednesday it would seek only a small profit and ensure it is widely available in hard-hit countries.

Glaxo will likely derive a "small 5 percent return" on the vaccine, Witty said, enough to help encourage other drugmakers to continue their own research against diseases that remain big killers in least developed countries.

"(Its) sales in dollars will be a very small number," he told reporters ahead of a planned speech on Wednesday to the Council on Foreign Relations in New York.

"We must ... ensure that we do not do anything which would discourage other companies from entering into this field," he said, adding that Glaxo''s return would be reinvested into research on medicines for diseases in poor countries.

"If we set a precedent of not-for-profit (pricing), we could discourage others from doing research into malaria or other neglected tropical diseases."

The Mosquirix vaccine is expected to complete late-stage trials in 2011 involving 16,000 people. If proven effective, and approved by regulators, it would be the first to protect against infection with mosquito-borne parasites that cause malaria.

"If it lives up to its promise, I think it''s incredible," Witty said. He said it could be a major weapon in the battle against the disease, which kills more than 1 million people a year worldwide, most of them children in Africa and Asia.

FREE MALARIA RESEARCH

Five researchers at Glaxo have spent a year testing 2 million molecules to identify any that might be developed into a treatment against malaria.

Witty said the 13,500 they had come up with would now be offered free to the scientific and research community, and other companies, to investigate further.

"This is the furthest anybody has gone," he said. "Nobody has put into the public domain the product of a 2 million screen (of molecules). These are essentially the building blocks from which all of our drugs eventually come."