Biology Goes Open Source

cford writes "According to Forbes some of the drug company giants are finally realizing that their genetic research is worth more if they give it away. 'Novartis, the Basel, Switzerland, drug giant, has helped uncover which of the 20,000 genes identified by the Human Genome Project are likely to be associated with diabetes. But rather than hoard this information, as drug firms have traditionally done, it is making it available for free on the World Wide Web. "It will take the entire world to interpret these data," says Novartis research head Mark Fishman. "We figure we will benefit more by having a lot of companies look at these data than by holding it secret."'"

Comments

What do you know

[Jack Malmostoso]

Maybe evil corporations are not that evil after all. Nah, can't be.

Re:What do you know

[Thusi02]

Wow this is quite the interesting decision that this private sector company has decided to do. This could truly help us in the battle of deciphering the human genome. So far what it has been is that the public sectors as soon as they get a new finding need to publish them asap. Where as the private sectors can make use of these public sector's findings to make it more profitable to them by combining it with their own research. Now that everyone is in the same boat and we have combined forces, we can surely understand ourselves better and perhaps find cures to diseases such as Diabetes or any other diseases that are caused at the genetic level. Can't wait to see what this will lead to.

Thusjanthan Kubendranathan

Re:What do you know

[MightyMartian]

While I applaud the company, the notion that the human genome or any part of it is anyone's to keep, license or give away is appalling.

How long until legal problems manifest themselves?

[SpaceLifeForm]

It just seems unlikely that the darkside won't
come up with some 'problem' to squash this
wonderful idea.

Biological Stallman

[shawn443]

But another requirement of making the leap from genes to drugs is making the research public--a step that will make it difficult for researchers elsewhere to patent any of this raw genetic information. The only thing I hate worse than software patents are genetic patents. If any industries could use a Stallman it would be biotech and genetic.

Re:Biological Stallman

[MightyMartian]

I have no problem with companies patenting novel genes (in other words genes that they have invented or have altered to perform a novel or improved function). But patenting genes that their sole effort (however small or big that might be) was to simply observe in catalog is no different than a zoologist patenting any new species he finds or an astronomer patenting the galaxies he sees in a telescope.

It's very obvious that patents have spun completely out of control, and that the public has bought hook, line and sinker into it when we're all lauding some corporate interest for giving away what never was theirs to begin with.

Mainly a good PR move . . .

[cashman73]

It's not like Novartis has made their entire drug database public with all of their notes regarding which drugs they're interested in pursuing or not,... They've done some significant analysis into the diabetes gene, and rather than withholding it, they're making it public. There's no real compelling reason to protect this aspect of the research, so why not? The benefits of releasing it outweigh the negatives:

• They still get to do their own research and develop their own drugs to target specific genes in this area.
• They get huge kudos in the PR arena for their attempts at finding a cure for cancer diabetes. They can use this in advertising campaigns.
• As researchers in other pharmaceutical companies and/or academia use this information, they'll eventually write grants and use it in their research. Novartis will still get the advantage from them citing the source,... Again, see the above advertising part,...

Re:Mainly a good PR move . . .

[Baba Ram Dass]

Yep, this is what drives the free market: people acting in their own self-interest. Novartis probably doesn't expect or intend to benefit others with this move (it's PR like you said), but undoubtedly their self-interest will end up benefiting others.

Yeah, but...

[guruevi]

closed source is so much more secure... what we need is developers, developers, developers, yeah, whoo

Seriously, I think all findings on the human genome project should be open. It took a huge effort and even persons at home let spare cycles run on this project. Our bodies, and what's inside should be open since it's not something 'they' invented, manufactured or engineered. Whatever drugs they're developing could be closed, but generics should definitely be allowed too.

Re:Yeah, but...

[SportyGeek]

Mod parent up. I also believe that many of these pharmaceutical companies should make their sequencing data of other organisms (read: pathogens) available to the public. This will make the drug discovery process much faster when more minds are thrown into the mix. Keeping data like this behind closed doors may be a good business model, but it certainly does not help the state of affairs in infectious diseases.

Re:Yeah, but...

[harvardian]

As a clarification, this research isn't part of the Human Genome Project. It's research that uses the results from the human genome project to identify genes associated with diabetes.

Or, in Slashdot-ese:

Step 1: Identify all of the human genes (the HGP)
Step 2: Find which of these genes are associated with diabetes
Step 3: ???
Step 4: Profit!

Remember this:

[Ubi_NL]

As a research scientist this move doesn't sound too strange.
However keep in mind that they are not providing the world with their raw data.
Rest assured that the milked it for anything that could give a profit, stripped that off and released the rest.
This is how it happens with large scale datasets all the time.

An example of what should be done!

[gavink42]

This is exactly how it should be for all the other nasty diseases we humans suffer from. Cancer, HIV, etc... maybe even the common cold could be brought down some levels with enough folks with access to all the data.

Re:An example of what should be done!

[SportyGeek]

There is actually a lot of data associated with human disease that has been made available to the public. There are three main DNA databases throughout the world: NCBI from the US, EMBL from Europe, and DDBJ from Japan. These public sequence databases have a plethora of links associated with them that you can explore and find out more about the biology of human disease from sequences to academic papers. An example of is the The Online Mendelian Inheritance in Man. The down side, of course, is that many of the newer papers require a subscription to read in their entirety.

A step in the right direction

[nickv111]

Patents on the medical and biological industry, while potentially good for the companies, are truly terrible for the rest of the world. The last thing we need is more expensive medicine, and having biological trade secrets released will help humanity as a whole.

I've done a little research on AIDS, for example, and to give you an example of what patents do for the cost of medicine, take a look at this quote from the New York Times article, "Look at Brazil."

"Until a year ago, the triple therapy that has made AIDS a manageable disease in wealthy nations was considered realistic only for those who could afford to pay $10,000 to $15,000 a year or lived in societies that could."

In developing countries, the cost of patented medication is the reason why many families cannot afford it and so many suffer from it. Now look at another quote from the same article:

"Brazil now produces some triple therapy for $3,000 a year and expects to do much better, and the price could potentially drop to $700 a year or even less."

Many countries cannot do this for fear of economic sanctions, which means the next logical step would be for companies to open up their medical and biological information, for the good of humanity. Not only will this help potential consumers of this medication, but also provide a base for other companies to build on to excel each other's knowledge.

Re:A step in the right direction

[DoctorPhil]

By your reasoning, nickv111, everybody would get everything cheaper if patent terms were shorter, or eliminated. And copyrights - they're a lot like patents. We should eliminate them, too. Then everybody could get everything for free!

Just like Soviet Russia. You can have everything in an empty shop for free.

The real cause of high prices in medications is the FDA approval process. It costs, on AVERAGE, about a BILLION dollars to get a drug approved in the US. A patent lasts 20 years, and it takes at least 10 years to get a drug approved. This means the pharma company has 10 years to recover their $1 billion investment.

Only, $1 billion invested over a period of 10 years is not the same as $1 billion at the time they start selling the drug, let alone $1 billion at tne END of that 10-year window! In order to have high enough profits to maintain their stock value, their investments have to appreciate at roughly 20% per year. If you spend $1 billion over 10 years, at the end of those 10 years, that $1 billion now is worth $3.01 billion. That doesn't mean that you have 10 years to make back $3 billion - that investment's sunk cost keeps increasing, to $9 billion by the end of those 10 years!

So, in fact, the pharama company has to make $900,000,000 in PROFIT, each year for 10 years, just to make up for the cost of getting FDA approval. That's apart from the cost of inventing the drug, manufacturing it, advertising it, and distributing it.

Re:A step in the right direction

[Dunbal]

So, in fact, the pharama company has to make $900,000,000 in PROFIT, each year for 10 years, just to make up for the cost of getting FDA approval.

      You know, drug companies don't suddenly stop making profit once the patent expires and competition begins. Look at how many companies sell plain old acetyl-salicilate (aka aspirin). They're obviously making money. So that's the first hole in your argument right there.

      Secondly, drug companies seem to forget that not everyone has a US income level. The price of medication is the same or more expensive outside the US than inside. This is to prevent people from "smuggling" meds into the US that were bought cheaper elsewhere. God forbid! So instead of getting into a 20 times bigger WORLD market, they decide to produce less, at a higher price. North americans can afford it - barely. And only the upper class everywhere else. And the rest, well, they just die younger. Who cares, right?

      Oh and as a doctor I've been invited to many, MANY dinners - at 5 star hotels, by pharmaceutical companies. I've had friends who have been flown to exotic locations for conferences on behalf of pharmaceutical companies. They want to give me lots of promotional things, from notepads to calculators and clocks, trying to recruit me as a salesman - they think my prescription pad is for hire. This costs money too.

      If only they understood that although I might read about the new wonderdrug in medical journals, what I usually prescribe is the cheapest medication around. It's what my patients want. I always give them a choice - the latest thing is X, the cheapest is Y. Invariably they choose Y.

      Big pharma should get that in their heads. The old products that they are still selling, even without patents, is what should fund the research. Someone who has taken lipitor for the past 10 years and is happy with it is probably not going to change in the NEXT 10 years.

      They should not gouge people on a new med because a) they can, due to a monopoly situation and b) try to justify this gouging because of "the cost of research".

      But then again, pharmacology has always been about commerce and making money. Healing the patient is incidental.

Re:Speaking of which..

[Pedrito]

Any of you 3 Womans on slashdot wanna give away some genetic research?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woman

Clearly you went straight to the naked pictures and skipped the second sentence of the article you link that points out that the plural of "woman" is "women" and not "Womans". Not that the post would have been funny if you could spell.

I call BS

[cinnamon colbert]

What this means is they can't figure out how to use the info before the patents expire. The idea that novartis or any other drug company would let loose proprietary info on a gene they thought would lead them to a drug for diabetes is ludicrous.

Hurray!

[blueZhift]

This sounds like pretty good news. While I see nothing wrong with corporations wanting to make a profit, there are, I think, serious ethical problems with withholding information that could save many lives. And in particular, I think that the information in the human genome is something that belongs to all of humankind. Working together, not only will lives be saved and enhanced, but some serious money will be made as well, sooner rather than later.

They're not talking about licensing a portion...

[JoshDM]

While I applaud the company, the notion that the human genome or any part of it is anyone's to keep, license or give away is appalling.

They're not talking about licensing a portion; they're talking about giving away knowledge regarding which portion likely relates to diabetes.

Post title is misleading, but parallels do exist

[Bearhouse]

This is not really about 'open source', it's about 'Big Pharma' trying to address its problems by leveraging its (diminishing) assets, and trying to access multiple sources of innovation. See the informative article in 'The Economist' - Jan 25th - 'Billion dollar pills' (Economist.com). Since it's a subscription site, here are a few extracts, (fair use): "The industry's share prices have performed pitifully and a new report from Accenture, a consultancy, calculates that a whopping $1 trillion of "enterprise value", which measures future profitability, has been wiped out because investors have lost faith in drugmakers' growth prospects" "Three of the biggest drugs firms have brought in new bosses to help turn things around." "The risks have been compounded by vertical integration" "Mr Kindler [new boss of Pfizer] also wants his secretive researchers to open up and work more closely with outsiders. He has put the company's drugs pipeline on the internet for all to scrutinise and declared his intention to pursue outside collaborations and acquisitions keenly. There's much more, but the underlying truth is that large corporations seem to have to have problems 'institutionalising innovation', and thus end up like Cisco, Microsoft & others - spending fortunes on R&D, but then spending even more on buying ideas in from start-ups or Academe. You can bet that as soon as someone finds a use for this information, 'Big Pharma' will be there with it's chequebook wide open. Is that a bad thing? Well, as another poster noted, perhaps it would be better if so-called 'underdeveloped' countries had the rights to produce & distribute in their local markets. Of course, another wildcard could be the Bill & Melinda et al. foundation. That would be ironic, the 'king' of closed-source using his $ to finance a somewhat 'open-source' model.

Biology was already open source

[Puff Daddy]

The study of biology was already open source. There is a wealth of data at the NCBI and other sources. We are seeing a renaissance in molecular biology right now and I, for one, attribute it to the hard work of thousands of researchers freely sharing their work. It's not just the data either, it's journals and software, too. We have more information than we know how to handle, and it's being created much faster than it will ever be understood. It's gotten to a point where new fields of study are being created just to interpret the collected data and try to make some sense of it. Bioinformatics and computational biology are truly amazing fields, the only trouble is attempting to explain just what it is you do to friends and relatives. Trust me, it's not always easy.

Why this hype?

[aschoff_nodule]

This is not the first time this has happened.

A lot of private firms have identified disease susceptibility genes. There is a company in Iceland called 'deCode' - http://www.decode.com/ which has been doing this stuff for many years now, exploiting the fact the iceland has a relatively stable and homogenous genetic population. They have genetic data available for more than 25% of the population of Iceland and they have innumerable papers and free online resources.

Not to mention the federal govt. has been doing this forever now and 'Human Genome Project' and 'Hapmap project' are well known.

Novartis fighting India over generic drugs

[Christian Engstrom]

You are quite right when you say that patent may be good for the pharmaceutical companies, but are terrible for the rest of the world.

In India, Novartis is using all its legal muscle to challenge a provision in the Indian patent law that has made it possible for India to develop a strong generic drugs industry. This has made affordable medicines available not only in India, but to other developing countries as well. If Novartis wins the case, this could mean that access to affordable drugs in the third world will be drastically reduced.

There was an article at OneWorld South Asia about the case recently:

The struggle for affordable medicines

India, which amended its patent laws for TRIPS-compliance in 2005, introduced a clause to ensure that pharmaceuticals did not block the entry of low-cost generic drugs. A year ago this clause blocked Novartis' patent application for its anti-cancer drug Gleevec. Now, in a major case that will have a profound effect on the affordability of essential medicines in India, Novartis is challenging this unique Indian provision.
...
If Novartis succeeds in this unprecedented challenge, India's status as the primary supplier of low-cost essential medicines to the developing world will be jeopardised.
...
This marks the first time the world over that a private entity has challenged the prerogative of a country to implement the TRIPS agreement in accordance with its public health priorities. Should Novartis succeed in its challenge, it will not only mark a significant step back in the struggle for affordable medicines, but it will mark the first time that the demands of a private multinational corporation have overridden a sovereign country's right to protect the health of its people.

So if anyone thinks of Novartis and the other big pharma companies as a bunch of good guys, he should think again.

Re:Post title is misleading, but parallels do exis

[Dunbal]

large corporations seem to have to have problems 'institutionalising innovation', and thus end up like Cisco, Microsoft & others - spending fortunes on R&D, but then spending even more on buying ideas in from start-ups or Academe.

      As a physician I am often shocked to think about how much pharmaceutical companies charge for medications. Especially considering that my practice is in the "third world", price is the absolute foremost concern for all my patients when it comes to prescribing a medication. They will often insist on an inferior generic product instead of paying three or four times as much for a newer, better drug. I understand that research is expensive.

      I also know that a lot of money is spent "visiting" doctors trying to convince us that their product is the "best", organizing "conferences" for us (which are nothing more than sales pitches) with free dinner included, etc. Not to mention all the free pens, calculators, calendars and other promotional materials. Some of my colleagues virtually thrive on this stuff. I for one would rather see cheaper medication. Less price, higher volume is what I think they should be looking at. And if they can't make profit on volume, then they should stop trying to push that product as if it was the new Holy Grail - only the very rich will buy it - period.

      A case in point - the vaccine for HPV (cervical cancer's principle cause). It costs over $300 PER DOSE and you need 3 doses. Whoa, that's $1000. With the average monthly salary at around $350 a month here, how many of those do they expect to sell? Even in the US a lot of people would stop and think about this. And how many do they expect me to keep on hand in my fridge at that price, taking into account expiration dates, breakages, etc? Great concept. Completely useless at that price.

      Anyway, my $.02 worth. They shouldn't complain about being unprofitable - they've priced themselves out of the market. People will always get sick. They just can't afford to pay for the medication anymore.

Re:patenting any genes is absurd

[ScrewMaster]

... it's a fucking gene!

If somebody finds that gene and patents it we're all in trouble.

What do we mean by Open Source?

[Ignis Flatus]

If I invent something, but keep the details of my invention a secret, then that is certainly not free and not Open Source. But if I patent my invention, the use of the idea is still not free, but the knowledge practically is. Are patents Open Source?

The reason I'm asking this is I wasn't sure from the article if the company was actually giving anything away. It is not clear to me if I invent a new drug based off the information they provided, do I now owe them a royalty?

Open Source by patent (or copyright) is a great idea if you think you can make more money off licenses to others than by your own efforts. Secrecy is better if you think that your information is based on special insight and others will not be able to duplicate it independently for several decades. What they gave away (assuming they gave anything away) may not have much intrinsic value if it is easily duplicated by others.

Re:obsession with cost

[jc42]

I do not see any problems with them being able to charge and arm and a leg for the treatment, after all, if you do not pay the arm and the leg, you will lose both arms, both legs, the torso and the head to the disease.

Well, people do have a history of being upset with someone who says "Your money or your life." ;-)

We might chalk it up to basic human irrationality. After all, there are several popular economic theories that explain to us why the companies' behavior is rational. And we all know that we're going to die anyway. What does it matter to the universe (or the economy) if you or I die today or 20 years from now? Not much, really, unless you or I is a major celebrity. But still, people irrationally insist on wanting to live longer, and they even more irrationally insist on not becoming homeless paupers in order to stay alive.

Dunno how we can get people to behave rationally, though. Let us know if you figure out how.