GlaxoSmithKline (GSK), Britain’s biggest drugmaker, is placing a small but important bet on a new way of treating diseases by targeting electrical signals in the body.
The company said on Wednesday it would offer a US$1 million prize to stimulate innovation in the field, as well as funding up to 40 researchers working in external laboratories.
The initiative is a long-term gamble on the promise of a new kind of medicine using electrical impulses rather than the chemicals or biological molecules found in today’s drugs.
GSK believes it is ahead of rivals in the emerging area and, given the early-stage nature of the work, the drugmaker aims to play a coordinating role in bringing researchers together.
The new field of “electroceuticals” has also grabbed the attention of a number of academic research groups which are already mapping neural circuits in animals and humans, and working on potential interventions for testing in clinical trials.
“At GlaxoSmithKline and in academia, we are confident that this field will deliver real medicines, and we are mobilizing resources for this journey,” GSK head of bioelectronics research Kristoffer Famm and colleagues wrote in the journal Nature.
Academic centers involved in the research effort include the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of Pennsylvania and the Feinstein Institute of Medical Research.
The idea is to use the electrical impulses that form the “language” of the body’s nervous system to address a range of diseases, from high blood pressure to breathing problems and, eventually, brain disorders.
Moncef Slaoui, chairman of GSK research and development, said bioelectronics was set to be the next big wave in medicine, comparable to the rise in biological therapies over the past 15 years.
“This is our vision for the next 10 to 20 years,” he said. “In the future, a big chunk of R&D will be doing bioelectronics.”
The concept is not completely new. Large-scale electrical devices have been used for years as heart pacemakers and, more recently, electrical stimulation has been applied to treat Parkinson’s disease, severe depression and some neurological disorders, as well as to improve bladder control.
St Jude Medical, for example, on Wednesday won European approval for a brain implant to treat an incurable neurological condition called dystonia, while nerve-deadening devices have also been shown to reduce stubbornly high blood pressure. However, in future GSK wants to apply electrical interventions at the micro level by targeting specific cells within neural circuits. That could lead to novel nanoscale implants to coax insulin from cells to treat diabetes or correct muscle imbalances in lung diseases or regulate food intake in obesity.
The approach could also one day be used to treat disorders of the brain itself — assuming scientists can decipher the hugely complex neural circuitry involved.
GSK will host a global forum in December to bring research leaders together and collectively identify one key hurdle in the field. The US$1 million prize will go to the research group able to overcome that hurdle.
Taiwan Transport and Storage Corp (TTS, 台灣通運倉儲) yesterday unveiled its first electric tractor unit — manufactured by Volvo Trucks — in a ceremony in Taipei, and said the unit would soon be used to transport cement produced by Taiwan Cement Corp (TCC, 台灣水泥). Both TTS and TCC belong to TCC International Holdings Ltd (台泥國際集團). With the electric tractor unit, the Taipei-based cement firm would become the first in Taiwan to use electric vehicles to transport construction materials. TTS chairman Koo Kung-yi (辜公怡), Volvo Trucks vice president of sales and marketing Johan Selven, TCC president Roman Cheng (程耀輝) and Taikoo Motors Group
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
RECORD-BREAKING: TSMC’s net profit last quarter beat market expectations by expanding 8.9% and it was the best first-quarter profit in the chipmaker’s history Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), which counts Nvidia Corp as a key customer, yesterday said that artificial intelligence (AI) server chip revenue is set to more than double this year from last year amid rising demand. The chipmaker expects the growth momentum to continue in the next five years with an annual compound growth rate of 50 percent, TSMC chief executive officer C.C. Wei (魏哲家) told investors yesterday. By 2028, AI chips’ contribution to revenue would climb to about 20 percent from a percentage in the low teens, Wei said. “Almost all the AI innovators are working with TSMC to address the
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”