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New Startup Hopes to Push Open Source Pharmaceuticals
waderoush writes "Nothing like the open source computing movement has ever caught fire in biology or pharmaceuticals, where intellectual property is king. But drawing inspiration from the people who make Linux software, and the social networking success of Facebook, Merck's cancer research leader has nailed down $5 million to launch a nonprofit biology platform called Sage, which aims to make it easier for researchers around the world to pool their data to make better drugs. 'We see this becoming like the Google of biological science. It will be such an informative platform, you won't be able to make decisions without it,' says Merck's Eric Schadt, a co-founder of Sage. He adds: 'We want this to be like the Internet. Nobody owns it.'"
$5 million?
That will be burnt up in a single clinical trial.
You mean like when research was in the domain of the university, and when science was done by building on the prior work of others? The big dollar companies siphoned away the talent from universities and went patent crazy. They're the ones that started this in the first place.
The same can be said for internet technologies - people forget that fundamental web technologies such as web browsers and LDAP came out of university research, not out of the big companies or the major standards bodies.
Next thing they'll be telling us is we could GROW our own medications in gardens. Medicine and pharmaceuticals are *hard* and require a lot of big government seed money, research, lobbyists, more money, more lobbyists, advertising, etc. The idea that you could grow, say a drug to suppress inter-ocular pressure in glaucoma patients, or a nausea-suppressive for chemotherapy patients is patently absurd! I mean, what next? Analgesics from tree bark?!
Hippie, commie, open-sourcers will never learn.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
A major expense in the development of pharmaceuticals is the testing and approval phase. Only wealthy entities like corporations or governments can afford it. I don't see how the open source concept can get around that problem.
If one gathers data from many sources, in order to justify to the US FDA some claim about a drug: how can one certify that those data are accurate?
I was under the impression that despite its horrific flaws, the current regime requires the drug researchers to seriously vouch for the (subset of) the data they present to the FDA.
Intellectual property may be king, but the lawyers are queens (pardon the expression), and their games are hideously expensive. You can't get into the legit end of the drugs business without a strategy for covering legal liability. You should budget at least as much for this as for clinical trials or production facilities. $5M is peanuts in this game.
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
drugs coming from a bunch of guys in their garages
As long as experts contribute, there shouldn't be a problem. Maybe a registration with credentials would be good.
Software is special, in that all the hardware required is now commodity, and all the knowledge can be accessed fairly easily. At least, you won't see $300 biochem labs from Dell.
Open access journals such as those from BMC and PLoS, databases such as those at NCBI and EBI, software repositories such as Bioconductor and the Open Bioinformatics Foundation projects (Bioperl, Biopython, etc.) If Sage can take it to the next level, good for them, but I'm not sure I see how one group is going to accomplish this. I suspect it will have to happen more, um, organically, the way open access publication and biology-targeted OSS have.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
drugs coming from a bunch of guys in their garages
As long as experts contribute, there shouldn't be a problem. Maybe a registration with credentials would be good.
Minor problem. Who gets to determine that some researcher isn't an expert, as opposed to that biochem college dropout who knows what he's doing, as opposed to the well meaning schmo whose job is construction, but he knows some folk remedies, as opposed to a methamphetamine dealer whose knowledge of how to brew some rocks is exceeded only by his stupidity in smoking around ether?
Disclaimer: The opinions and actions of the US Gov't are in no way representative of those held by this author or its ci
According to your ideas, then, Linux would have never got off the ground and yet here we are.