The Experimental Medicine Initiative to Explore New Therapies (EMINENT) network will be coordinated by University College London (UCL) and will bring together teams of researchers from the Universities of Cambridge, Glasgow, Newcastle, Imperial College London and UCL, with GSK researchers to study the fundamental biological mechanisms responsible for a range of inflammatory diseases. Professor Edwin Chilvers, Professor of Respiratory Medicine, will be leading the University of Cambridge’s involvement, and his colleagues Professors Arthur Kaser and Ken Smith and Dr David Jayne will be leading research themes.

It is hoped that combining the disease biology expertise of these academic scientists with GSK’s drug development expertise and resources will ultimately lead to breakthroughs in understanding that could accelerate the development of innovative treatments for patients.

Drug development is a lengthy, costly and risky process, with the majority of promising treatments failing in clinical trials and hence never reaching patients as medicines. This is because the biological processes that underlie many diseases are still not fully understood.

By gaining a better understanding of the inflammatory process in diseases such as Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD) and fibrosis, the collaboration aims to improve the success rate for discovering new potential treatments for these and other diseases.