NATO faces big bill if it does not pick AWACS successor soon: officials

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PARIS (Reuters) - NATO faces significant costs if it does not act soon to choose a successor for its ageing fleet of 14 Boeing E-3A Airborne Warning & Control System (AWACS) surveillance aircraft, often called the alliance’s “eyes in the sky”, senior officials said.

FILE PHOTO: A NATO AWACS (Airborne Warning and Control Systems) aircraft approaches the Air Base number 5 during the Real Thaw 2018 exercise in Monte Real, Portugal February 6, 2018. REUTERS/Rafael Marchante/File Photo

Michael Gschossmann, general manager of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization agency that manages the AWACS fleet, said he expected to finalize by December a $750 million contract with U.S. arms maker Boeing Co to extend the life of the aircraft through 2035, with $250 million more earmarked for design, spare parts and testing.

But he said it was critical to decide quickly how to replace the 1979/1980-era airplanes, with their distinctive radar domes on the fuselage, or NATO would need to take costly steps to keep them flying even longer.

“We have to get moving on this. We have to ensure that the studies move along quickly. We need a reality check,” he said.

The AWACS planes are among the few military assets owned and operated by NATO, rather than individual states. They are used to conduct missions such as air policing, support for counter-terrorism operations, evacuations, and crisis response.

Gschossmann told Reuters NATO could follow the lead of member states Britain and Turkey in purchasing the E-7, a newer radar plane also built by Boeing. Those aircraft, he said, were large enough to add potential new capabilities, such as operating drones for expanded surveillance, in coming years.

“We have to ensure that we acquire a system that has growth potential, but that also – for financial and time reasons – is based on existing capabilities,” he said.

NATO is considering the AWACS replacement issue as part of a broader study of surveillance, but the process has dragged out given rapidly changing threats and newly emerging capabilities.

France and the United States also operate E-3A aircraft and could potentially buy E-7 planes in coming years, which could lower costs by generating larger order quantities.

“Why don’t we bet on the proven technology that we already have in the E-7 and provide NATO with a certain number of those aircraft? That would give us a basic capability that could be expanded in the future,” he said.

George Riebling, deputy general manager of the agency and a former senior U.S. official, said NATO was running out of time.

“If you don’t have an idea of what you’re going to do to replace NATO AWACS, then the ‘F’ in Final Lifetime Extension Programme (FLEP) can’t stand for final,” he said.

“There will be things we need to do to the NATO E-3A fleet to keep it flying past 2040.”

The FLEP program will update the aircraft’s mission system, as well as the processors for its electronic support measures (ESM) antenna. But it does not cover the radar itself, which would have doubled the cost.

Reporting by Andrea Shalal; Editing by Andrew Cawthorne

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GSK signs up gene-editing pioneers in drug discovery alliance

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(Reuters) - British drugmaker GSK said it has struck a research deal with the early pioneers of a prominent gene-editing technology at the University of California, in a boost to its prospects for developing new drugs.

GlaxoSmithKline, Britain’s largest drugmaker, will pay up to $67 million over a five-year period for the new Laboratory for Genomics Research, which will be jointly run with the University of California and led by researchers such as Jennifer Doudna, a co-inventor of the CRISPR gene-editing technology.

New gene editing tools - with CRISPR/Cas9 as the most prominent example - have thrown the door wide open for rearranging the genetic code much more precisely and at lower costs than previously possible.

The technology made headlines last year when a Chinese scientist caused outrage with a claim to have “gene-edited” babies, but CRISPR/Cas9 can also be used in medical and agricultural research without interfering with the human germline.

CRISPR works as a molecular scissors that can trim away unwanted pieces of genetic material and replace them with new ones. Easier to use than older techniques, it has quickly become a preferred method of gene editing in research labs.

The new GSK lab will run tests on various irregularities in the human genome and track the malfunctions they trigger in cells, hoping to gain a clearer understanding of the causes of cancer as well as neurological and immunological diseases.

“Once we understand how that changes its function, we can think about how to mitigate that functional impairment and normalize the cell, and normalize, hopefully, the patient by just developing a drug that could prevent them from developing the disease,” said GSK’s Chief Scientific Officer Hal Barron.

GSK, which had hired Barron from Alphabet-backed biotech firm Calico in 2017, will become more dependent on its drug development fortunes as it prepares to fold its consumer health business into a joint venture with Pfizer that will be separately listed.

Automation and heavy-duty computing will allow researchers to analyze hundreds of millions of genetic combinations per experiment at the new lab, Barron added.

The University of California in February scored a victory in a drawn-out legal battle with the Cambridge, Massachusetts-based Broad Institute over the CRISPR patent application that Doudna filed together with Emmanuelle Charpentier of the University of Vienna in 2012.

The new lab in San Francisco will include facilities for 24 full-time university employees funded by GSK plus up to 14 full-time GSK staff.

Other pharma companies are investing in the new method. Bayer and Vertex Pharmaceuticals have independently established collaborations with CRISPR Therapeutics, a biotech firm working on gene therapies.

For GSK, the California lab project ties in with existing data-driven alliances in genetic research with Alphabet-funded gene testing company 23andMe, or with the UK Biobank, a genetic database project.

Additional reporting by Michael Erman in New York, editing by Deepa Babington

Our Standards:The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

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