Pharmaceuticals, Nutraceuticals and now Electroceuticals!!
Glaxosmithkline (NYSE:GSK)
have announced their entry into a new field of medicine known as
Electroceuticals. The company have entered into academic institutions and
encourage research on developing new therapeutics which can treat diseases via
electrical signals. The company is crowdsourcing for this venture has announced
a prize money of $1 million for an innovative treatment option.
The company is nterested in projects that begin detailing
how nerves in the body are related to particular diseases, understand the
firing patterns of those nerves, and explore new technologies that will enable to
interface with multiple individual nerve fibres. As a first step, the company has put up an Ideation
challenge via Innocentive with a prize money of $ 5000
Bioelectronic medicines or “electroceuticals” promise to
treat disease by modulating neural electrical impulses. Which specific disease
has a major peripheral neural control component and would be the best proof of
principle for such medicines?
You do not need to perform any experiments, only to describe
the conceptual approach and need in a total of 3 pages!
This is an Ideation Challenge with a guaranteed award for at
least one submitted solution. Solvers can also be considered for research funding.
GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) will also be convening an
international conference for the bioelectronic research community in December
2013, encouraging researchers to meet, build relationships and share early
findings.
A commentary on Nature is quite fascinating read and I’m
certainly interested to know more about and I have more to post on this subject
in the near future… Watch out for more….
