Big Pharma And A Public University Launched A Company To Cure HIV

A large drug company and a public university have launched a new company with the goal of not just treating, but curing HIV.

British health care giant GlaxoSmithKline has pledged $20 million over five years and roughly 10 of its scientists to the new effort. Its partner, the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, will contribute about 40 researchers, as well as access to patients at its hospital for clinical trials and laboratory space on its medical campus.Companies and universities routinely collaborate on scientific research. They’ll license each other’s technologies, and universities will even create startups to commercialize the ideas of its researchers. But the new company, named Qura Therapeutics, appears to be the first example of public and private science going into business together and splitting future profits equally.The partnership is especially notable because it’s not based on any specific invention or technology. “This sounds very open-ended, and I think this part of it is kind of unusual,” Kenneth Kaitin, director of the Tufts Center for the Study of Drug Development, told BuzzFeed News.The cultures of big pharma and academia are strikingly different, Kaitin added, often making it difficult to work out mutually agreeable terms. But with government funding of scientific research in a decade-long slump, Kaitin says we’re likely to see the private sector get more involved — in all sorts of ways. “Nothing is surprising to me anymore in terms of these relationships.”Read more at...BuzzFeed News, May 2015.