JAX-NYSCF and GSK Launch Alliance to Model Brain Disease in a Dish

NEW YORK, NY – February 17, 2026 – In a significant move to accelerate the fight against neurodegenerative diseases, The Jackson Laboratory–New York Stem Cell Foundation Collaborative (JAX-NYSCF) and pharmaceutical giant GSK today announced a five-year strategic research collaboration. The partnership aims to develop and utilize advanced human cellular models of diseases like Alzheimer's, hoping to crack the code of these debilitating conditions and fast-track the development of new medicines.

The alliance brings together JAX-NYSCF's leadership in genomics and stem cell technology with GSK's deep expertise in drug discovery. Their shared goal is to overcome a persistent obstacle in medicine: the high failure rate of promising drugs for brain disorders, a problem largely blamed on the inadequacy of traditional research models.

A New Engine for Discovery

This collaboration is built upon a recently forged powerhouse in biomedical research. The Jackson Laboratory (JAX), a global leader in mammalian genetics, significantly expanded its capabilities in October 2025 with the acquisition of the New York Stem Cell Foundation (NYSCF). The merger created the JAX-NYSCF Collaborative, an entity uniquely positioned to tackle complex diseases.

NYSCF brought to the table its pioneering work in human stem cell science, most notably the NYSCF Global Stem Cell Array®. This state-of-the-art robotic platform automates the creation and differentiation of induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs). These iPSCs, often generated from a patient's skin or blood sample, can be reprogrammed to become any cell in the body—including the neurons and glial cells that are ravaged by neurodegenerative diseases.

By automating this process, JAX-NYSCF can produce thousands of standardized, patient-derived cell lines at a scale previously unimaginable. This capability is crucial for studying the vast genetic diversity of human disease and moving away from the animal models that have long dominated preclinical research.

"This collaboration is a concrete example of where early-stage biomedical research is heading," said Lon Cardon, president and CEO of JAX. "Now we have the opportunity to extend those discoveries—and accelerate therapies to patients—by bridging traditional disease models with next-generation patient-derived induced pluripotent stem cell (iPSC) models that more accurately capture the complexity of human biology at scale."

Overcoming the 'Valley of Death'

The path to a new drug is notoriously long and fraught with failure, especially in neuroscience. This so-called "valley of death" between a lab discovery and an approved medicine is littered with compounds that showed great promise in animal studies, only to fail in human clinical trials. For diseases like Alzheimer's, the failure rate has been over 99%.

A primary culprit is the reliance on rodent models, which often fail to replicate the intricate and slow-progressing pathology of human neurodegeneration. The biological gap between a mouse brain and a human brain is immense, leading to drug candidates that miss their mark when tested in people.

The JAX-NYSCF and GSK partnership aims to bridge this gap by creating better, more predictive models. By using iPSCs from patients with Alzheimer's, they can create "disease-in-a-dish" scenarios. Researchers can watch disease processes unfold in human neurons, test how cells from different individuals respond to drug compounds, and screen thousands of potential therapies with far greater accuracy.

These human-relevant models offer several advantages:

• Genetic Relevance: They capture the specific genetic background of the patient, allowing for the study of both rare, inherited forms of disease and the more common, sporadic cases.
• High-Throughput Screening: The automated platform enables the rapid testing of vast libraries of chemical compounds to identify promising drug candidates.
• Mechanistic Insight: Scientists can directly observe cellular-level dysfunctions, providing a clearer understanding of what goes wrong in the disease and how a potential drug might fix it.

GSK's Strategic Bet on Human Biology

For GSK, this five-year commitment represents a significant strategic investment. Like many of its peers, the company has faced setbacks in the neurodegenerative space, where the high cost of failure has made many risk-averse. The collaboration signals a calculated pivot toward foundational science and a belief that better models are the only way forward.

The partnership aligns with GSK's broader R&D strategy, which increasingly relies on external innovation and technologies that improve the predictability of early-stage research. By tapping into JAX-NYSCF's unique platform, GSK is not just outsourcing research but integrating a fundamentally new approach into its discovery pipeline.

"Establishing a translational biology and scientific discovery collaboration with JAX-NYSCF complements the work we are doing at GSK on cellular models of disease, and offers the potential to yield new insights that may help accelerate therapeutic discovery for devastating neurodegenerative diseases," said Chris Austin, senior vice president and global head of Research Technologies at GSK.

Austin emphasized the dual benefit of this approach: not only developing new medicines but also understanding which patients are most likely to respond to them. This focus on patient stratification is a cornerstone of modern precision medicine and could be a game-changer for designing more efficient and successful clinical trials in the future.

The Promise of 'Clinical Trials in a Dish'

The ultimate vision for this technology is to conduct what some call "clinical trials in a dish." Before enrolling a single human patient, researchers could test a drug on iPSC-derived brain cells from thousands of individuals with diverse genetic profiles, all housed in the robotic arrays of the JAX-NYSCF labs.

This approach could predict which genetic subgroups will respond best to a therapy, who might experience adverse effects, and who might not respond at all. It allows scientists to fail fast and cheap in the lab, rather than slow and expensive in multi-year human trials. By identifying the right drug for the right patient early in the process, the collaboration hopes to dramatically reduce the attrition rate and shorten the timeline for bringing effective treatments to market.

While significant challenges remain in fully maturing these cellular models to replicate the complexity of an entire brain, this partnership represents a powerful and hopeful step forward. By combining genomics, robotics, stem cell biology, and pharmaceutical expertise, JAX-NYSCF and GSK are not just searching for a new drug; they are building a better way to search.