Global biopharma company GSK and the University of Bristol have a long-standing collaboration of more than 10 years. The work with GSK builds on and supports the University’s interdisciplinary excellence; and together, contributes to more sustainable and equitable health outcomes for people across the world.  

As a global company, GSK aims to positively impact the health of 2.5 billion people by the end of 2030. The University of Bristol collaboration with GSK is based on large research projects, PhD studentships and consultancy and has expanded in scale considerably in the last couple of years.  

Academic reputation is of high importance for GSK when selecting universities to partner with, across the world. Initially GSK was attracted to working with University of Bristol by the strong reputation of the School of Chemistry, ranked number one for research in the UK (THE analysis of REF 2021).  

GSK now funds research with the University of Bristol across many areas, including vaccine development, childhood disease, new targets for existing drugs and oral health. Oral health collaborations are now under a separate company Haleon, following a demerger from GSK.  

GSK needs to constantly nurture a pipeline of outstanding talent. GSK invests in supporting students into careers in the pharmaceutical industry, currently funding 226 PhD students, 300 apprentices and over 300 undergraduate placements across UK universities.  

Malcolm Skingle, Director of Academic Liaison at GSK, said:

‘’We employ some of those students. We do our bit for the research community; they get GSK on their CV and maybe end up in a biotech, another university or indeed another pharma. We’ll continue to collaborate with them as we know they are good scientists.’’ 

As well as world-leading work in drug discovery and vaccine development, an area of increasing importance for pharma companies is large data. The University of Bristol and GSK are instrumental in driving forward data integrity through the UK Reproducibility Network (UKRN), which works across sectors to understand and improve the reproducibility of research.  

Marcus Munafò, Associate Pro Vice Chancellor for Research Culture at Bristol, and Chair of the UKRN Steering Group, said:

“Our efforts to improve data integrity and research quality are essential not just to the academic sector but to end users of our research and external partners. We’re extremely excited about the prospect of this collaboration continuing to grow and flourish”.