Two charities have agreed to pay several million dollars to GlaxoSmithKline to help finance the development of new medicines for infectious diseases.
The Medicines for Malaria Venture and the TB Alliance, two non-profit drug development partnerships substantially supported by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, announced expanded funding to GSK on Thursday.
Under the terms of the separate deals, the organisations are set between them to pay more than $10m (£5.1m) over several years to fund GSK scientists and their research work at the company's Tres Cantos laboratory in Spain.
The agreement indicates a fresh endorsement for public-private drug development partnerships, which have developed in the past few years as a way to underwrite work on treatments and vaccines for diseases for which the commercial market is limited.
The partnerships suggest commercial companies are among the most efficient developers of new medicines and can be willing to leverage expertise into non-commercial areas, provided they can find backers to share risks.
GSK, which already works with The Medicines for Malaria Venture on other drugs, will begin a research programme on treatments using macrolide antibiotics, expanding the uses of drugs developed by the Pliva Institute that GSK acquired in Croatia.
The TB Alliance will continue its existing programme with GSK in developing five experimental drugs designed to accelerate and improve the effectiveness of treating tuberculosis.
Tres Cantos, with an annual operating budget of about $30m, involves 250 scientists and works primarily on infectious diseases.
Jean-Pierre Garnier, GSK's chief executive, said: "Public-private partnerships are an important step forward in the world's crusade against diseases such as malaria and TB. But funding remains inadequate. Wealthy nations must give more and greater incentives are needed for big and small pharmaceutical companies to increase the volume of potential new medicines and vaccines."