Hello and welcome to the podcast of the Life Scientific.

First broadcast on BBC Radio 4.

I'm Jim Alleili and my mission is to interview

the most fascinating and important scientists alive today and to find out what makes them tick.

My guest today is something of a rare breed,

a gamekeeper turned poacher, an academic who's moved over into industry, and not just any industry, but the pharmaceutical

industry. At the time, Patrick Valence was professor of clinical pharmacology and head of the

Department of Medicine at University College London, a pioneer of research

into some of the body's key regulatory systems.

He'd also been publicly critical of big farmer for, and I quote, funding studies more helpful to marketing than to

advancing clinical care. By his own admission he didn't know that much about how

the industry worked until one evening in 2006 when he was asked a question

over a dinner a question that will be pivotal to his life and career. Today he's

head of research and development at Glaxo-SmithKline, one of the world's largest pharmaceutical companies,

with annual revenues in excess of 20 billion pounds and nearly 100,000 employees worldwide.

Since he joined, he's reshaped the way G.S.K carries out its research into drug development and has been

behind several radical initiatives in global health care.

Patrick, welcome to the Life Scientific. It's a great

pleasure to be here. Thank you. So first tell us about that evening that

changed your life. What happened? Well I had become involved in GSK a couple of years before that I'd been invited

onto their research advisory board and I was having dinner with the then head of R&D and

we were chatting about all sorts of things and he said, why don't you come and join?

...