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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.'"
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.
...You should budget at least as much for this as for clinical trials or production facilities. $5M is peanuts in this game.
I'll work for peanuts!
When I saw the title I thought "How the HELL can you have 'open source pharmaceuticals' in a legal regime where new drug compounds are illegal by default?"
Then I read TFA.
This has NOTHING to do with making "open source pharmaceuticals". This is about sharing data among drug companies and doctors to try to get a better handle on things like:
- understanding the gene-regulation changes that occur in major diseases
- designing better drugs using this data
- customizing drug therapies by selecting drugs that are a good match for a patient's genetics and disease, picking those that will be safe and effective for him in particular while avoiding those that would cause dangerous side-effects due to his particular genetics.
It looks like it will run afoul of HIPPA unless it's very carefully designed.
BAD article title. No donut.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Drug research isn't actually all that expensive (as in generating concepts). What is expensive is drug development - which is working a concept into a drug candidate and then putting it through trials.
I suspect that what will happen is that drug companies will look at the breakthroughs in these open consortiums and then develop candidates and patent them and run them through trials.
Example - the "open source" consortium discovers that inhibiting enzyme A cures cancer. Now, you can't patent the idea of inhibiting enzyme A. However, you can patent molecule 123 as an inhibitor of enzyme A. Somebody else could of course come up with molecule 456 which does the same thing but is a different molecule entirely. That's what we call a me-too drug and it is the reason why people with drug allergies don't die of diseases (they can take a me-too drug instead), and the reason for marginal improvements in classes over time (maybe molecue 456 is slightly better than 123).
However, once the company proves 123 is safe, they own the market until soembody else comes out with another drug. 123 is after all patent protected.
Consumers still win because maybe 456 comes along a year later and prices drop as they compete.
The issue at big drug companies is that they're having trouble coming up with breakthrough ideas for new drugs. The market doesn't need another statin that works 3% better than the 14 that are already on the market. However, something novel would certainly be both profitable and beneficial to the public. So, drug companies are trying to fund more novel R&D. Once some concepts worth developing come out the big pharma companies are experts at running molecules through the process, and after a few hundred million dollars spent getting something on the market.
This is also smart as the expensive part of drug development is the development part. You're not going to find poorly-funded researchers contributing much to that part of the puzzle. However, the blue sky research component needs ingenuity more than money - and that is what things like this are good at.
It is an interesting concept - I wonder how it will work out...
I wish they would invest more time in making available drugs that have already had their patent expired. I am not talking about stuff that expired yesterday, I am talking about stuff that been out for years but the market is too small for a large company to invest in it.
I forgot the name of the drug, but it was a cheap drug that served a small market, but it very vital. It was being produced cheaply for years from one factory that served the whole market. Somebody bought it and then jacked up the price by 100 fold. Why? Because no one was going to bother with drug that had such a small market share, but it was critical the people who depend on the drug.
Someone tell me what the drug is? I believe there was an article in the NY Times a few years ago about it.