Glaxo Finds a Rich Vein to Mine With Supercomputers

Bloomberg

by James Paton

October 12, 2017

Each year, drugmakers shelve, write off or discard thousands of possible treatments that don’t appear to have value in the clinic. To GlaxoSmithKline Plc, those failures are a rich vein ready for prospecting.

Glaxo is turning to supercomputers to trace the paths of millions of unsuccessful drugs, hoping to find a quicker course to the patient bedside and cut costs. The U.K.’s biggest pharmaceutical company is joining with U.S. government and university researchers in a bid to shrink the journey from identifying a biological target to finding a drug that hits it. It’s often a six-year process. Glaxo wants to do it in one...