In 2010 Simon Ward, an associate director in the neuroscience division at the pharmaceutical firm Glaxo-Smith Kline (GSK), was fired, along with the rest of the division. At the time, the guillotining of neuroscience was part of a global move in big pharma to back away from brain research, deemed too difficult and risky. Determined to help fill that void, Dr Ward secured £14m ($19m) from the Wellcome Trust, a charity, the Medical Research Council and others to launch a new institute focused on turning discoveries in neuroscience into medicines. And so the Medicines Discovery Institute (MDI) began.
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