GSK Will Invest Up To £600k To Support ‘trust In Science' Initiative

Pharma major GlaxoSmithKline Pharmaceuticals (GSK) has launched ‘Trust in Science’ initiative in partnership with the Regional Centre for Biotechnology (RCB), to develop PhD courses in biostatistics and bioinformatics. A Vaidheesh, Vice President, South Asia and Managing Director, GSK tells more to Akanki Sharma

- Akanki Sharma

Kindly share a brief about the ‘Trust in Science’ programme. What does it offer and who are its beneficiaries?

Globally, GSK Pharmaceutical’s ‘Trust in Science’ initiative is a novel public-private partnership model to build R&D capacity for development and discovery in science. The pillars of this initiative are scientific excellence, trust and talent development in line with GSK’s science, technology and cultural values.

In India, we have launched the ‘Trust in Science’ initiative in partnership with the Regional Centre for Biotechnology (RCB), one of India’s academic research institutions to develop PhD courses in biostatistics and bioinformatics. The initiative covers scholarship costs and provides expert guidance to 12 students, so that they can complete their doctoral degrees. Any student with a master’s degree in biostatistics and bioinformatics is eligible to apply for this programme.

What prompted you to initiate a doctoral programme for bioinformatics and biostatistics only? How do you think it is going to benefit the pharma sector in India?

Our industry is generating huge amounts of biological and genomic data. This means we are dealing with massive data sets which were unimaginable some 20 years ago. Now comes the challenge of mining this data for insights and trends which can be extrapolated in a way that leads us to think and plan our future more strategically. Both bioinformatics and biostatistics offer immense promise here. Both the fields can drive the investigation and processing of large sets of biological information in a short period of time. This is of great value to a country like ours, with large sample sizes and varying factors that influence disease and healthcare delivery.