Feb. 13 (Bloomberg) -- GlaxoSmithKline Plc will share its tropical disease research with other drugmakers to develop medicine for illnesses that beset poor countries, Chief Executive Officer Andrew Witty said.

Glaxo, of London, would pool research with rivals to jointly develop treatments for diseases plaguing the world’s 50 poorest countries, Witty said in an interview today in Boston. Most of the treatments would aid Africa, he said.

“How do we maximize innovation in an area where there’s been almost no innovation for 50 years?” Witty asked. “The theory is, we put in our knowledge base. What we’d like is for other people to put their knowledge base in.”

Glaxo joins Novartis AG, Pfizer Inc. and Sanofi-Aventis SA trying to help needy countries plagued by diseases. Witty’s proposal, outlined in a speech today at Harvard Medical School in Boston, focuses on drugs that treat 15 diseases including malaria and tuberculosis that are designated by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration as “neglected tropical diseases.”

The so-called patent pool concept of industry cooperation was used as early as 1917 to share costs and speed manufacturing of airplanes in World War I. While technology companies pool resources now working with common standards for computer software and mobile phones, partnerships have been rare in medicine.

New Application

“The principle is not new, but it’s certainly a new concept in the pharmaceutical field,” Ellen ‘t Hoen, senior adviser of intellectual property and patent pools at UNITAID, a government- backed organization developing the concept for AIDS patients in poor countries. “There is a real debate about the responsibility of people who develop intellectual property toward global health.”

Glaxo hasn’t invited any specific companies to join the patent pool, Witty said.

“How exactly it will create value, we’ll have to wait and see,” Witty said. “But that’s the intent. It will only really work if other companies do the same.”

Sharing research will help drugmakers devise treatments for diseases that afflict poor countries, Witty said. Exclusive patents are less valuable in these countries, because most people can’t afford brand-name drugs, he said.

“The intellectual property isn’t what guarantees the ability to capture the return because there is no likely return,” Witty said.

Witty also pledged to limit prices on its brand-name drugs in 50 of the poorest countries to no more than a quarter of their price in the U.S. and Europe. The company will reinvest 20 percent of any profit it makes in poor countries in health care, he said. That would have been about 5 million pounds ($7.2 million) last year, he said.

Micro-Level

“We’re not putting enormous amounts of money on the table here,” Witty said. The money “will make a significant difference at a micro-level. It doesn’t make a big difference to society.”

The FDA has encouraged research on neglected tropical diseases and parasitic worm infections.

Novartis, which opened an Institute for Tropical Disease in Singapore in 2004, has focused on potential treatments for malaria, TB and dengue fever. Drugmakers need to make sure patent prices don’t impede development of new medicines, Paul Herrling, chairman of Institute for Tropical Diseases at Swiss-based Novartis, said yesterday at a conference in London.

“People who funded the first round of research don’t have the resources to pay for the entire development process, including the billions spent on drugs that eventually fail,” Herrling said. “It’s time to take the task to countries and pool resources, to fund the research and development pipeline to registration” for new medicines.

To contact the reporters on this story: Trista Kelley in London at tkelley2@bloomberg.net; John Lauerman in Boston at jlauerman@bloomberg.net.

Last Updated: February 13, 2009 14:26 EST