Slashdot Mirror
Glaxo Open Sources Malaria Drug Search Data
smellsofbikes writes "GlaxoSmithKline, the world's second-largest pharmaceutical company, is putting thousands of possible malaria-treating drugs into the public domain in a move that the Wall Street Journal calls a 'Linux approach' to pharmaceutical screening. Andrew Witty, who is described as the boss of GSK, says the company thinks it is 'imperative to earn the trust of society, not just by meeting expectations but by exceeding them.' Of course, synthesis or discovery of new chemicals is cheap compared to efficacy and qualification studies, but this is a refreshing change from not handing out any information until after everything is patented."
I hope, sincerely, that this is the start of more collaborative efforts on the part of drug companies. We're quick to bash them but I believe we should applaud this effort.
Oh to be a fly on the wall when RMS reads that.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
This is old news in the pharmaceutical world. The general consensus is that this is only a PR stunt and doesn't really offer much at all. They're not offering the compounds as little bottles of powders, but only as pictures of the molecules. Don't be impressed.
'imperative to earn the trust of society, not just by meeting expectations but by exceeding them.
If you want to earn the trust of society, you should just do the right thing.
Explicitly stating that you want to earn the trust of the society is something you do in front of the shareholders, not publicly.
We already know you want our trust, and we already know what you'll do with it if you ever get it back.
WTF am I doing replying to an AC at 5 A.M on a Friday night?
_ how much data is released about the drugs? (it's one thing to say this drug is made of this, another to release all necessary information)
_ what drugs are released (is it really the most up to date stuff or is it the drugs that didn't work 15 years ago and are about to go in the public domain anyway)
warren buffet said, "behind every business decision... the good reason, what convinces everybody (we want to save the world), and the real reason (like we need a pr stunt).
if the real intent is common good... awesome, kudos to them.
Never antropomorphize computers, they do not like that
These a drugs that only poor tribal people really need. If it were research for something like a cancer drug (ie bought by rich westerners), then their moral high ground would quickly vanish.
Sorry, but I just don't buy it.
The nature of big pharmaceutical is well known. Profit is above all else for these people.
The data that has been released can not possibly be useful in terms of developing any kind of significantly effective drug to fight / cure / mitigate malaria.
It just isn't realistic to believe that a major drug company like Glaxo would do *ANYTHING* that was altruistic.
Not possible. The data is clearly useless.
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
It's Kline, not Klein.
Let's hope they get lots of good feedback, so, they will get the message not "everything" has to be closed-sourced.
This might be a good first incentive of another sector opening up in business.
It might be a PR stunt, but if this goes right, common people will see there are other possibilities; making it less feasable for this sector to force the impossible in the future...
I think all research for the 5 or 10 most common diseases should be open-sourced towards the world, for all to anticipate in such research.
--- I am known for the ones who want to find me on the net. Is that a privacy risk or a privilege? One might wonder..
From the Article:
"Witty will also announce an $8m fund to pay for scientists to explore these chemicals or others in an "open lab" within its research centre at Tres Cantos, Spain, which is dedicated to work on malaria and other diseases of the developing world."
With drug companies suggesting that it costs between $500 million and $2 billion dollars to develop a drug (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drug_development#Cost, as estimated by big-pharma while independents suggest $150 - 200 million), this seem more of a cheap attempt to buy the hearts and minds of the populus. I wonder how well these 13,500 drugs, have been tested extensively in the past for their potential in treating disease and have come up short in cost/benefit models, or how many of them were close to entering the public domain due to expiring intellectual property rights?
Hasn't Google and multiple other companies shown that there very well may be profit in a positive pro-people (as opposed to the more common system of pro-greed) concept. I wholeheartedly hope that this type of approach to branding, marketing or public relations gains more wide spread usage.
Lets face it, we as human beings want the good guys to win. If a company can express a certain goodness in nature, i have no doubt; and happily so, since this might be an interesting possibility for capitalistic economic systems, that they will realize the possible value of brand loyalty.
Of course you have to ask yourself, what if politicians took such an approach... that is, honesty.
Drug leads are cheap compared to developing a drug. A friend worked at a drug lead company. They got bought by a big pharma. Within 2 years they had produced more drug leads than the pharma could validate in the next decade. So the pharma sold off the company.
Glaxco is no doubt saturated with drug leads too. According to Merk is takes about 400 million dollars to walk one drug all the way through clinical trials. So there's a perpetual winnowing process at every stage with plenty of candidates to step in when an advanced compound is eliminated from further study.
If you sell your drug lead company who do you think buys it? the competition. SO it's not like open sourcing something gives your competition something they could not get otherwise.
Instead it just makes everything more efficient. The only reason for them to sit on those compounds would be if they simply wanted to prevent other from making them out of fear they might compete with their own,but having no intention of perusing them. Which would be pretty shitty business. It does happen of course (Monsanto is often accused of this.).
So Glaxo is being brave and doing the right thing. But it's not costing them anything except possibly competition if one of those abandoned leads turns out to be the one.
Now here' the twist:
Ironically, by opening it up they maybe doing more to supress this compound than if they had kept quiet. The reason is, it's now unpatentable. What other company would invest in it?
Thus short of government development of these. opening it up kills it's further development more effectively than saying nothing.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v465/n7296/full/nature09107.html The paper was already published last week in Nature. There was another paper by Guiguemde and Kip Guy in the same issue that my lab helped with. The problem is that antimalarial drugs need to be affordable for millions of people to take daily in places where people live off less than $1/day. Things like Coartem and even artemisinin combination pills cost too much for most of the countries that need them, due to patents and safe manufacturing facilities or even just raw materials. Luckily, malaria is getting special recognition and that helps a lot with widely dispensing every tool available to combat the parasite.
Just seeing a non-geek publication use that term makes me tingle.
I scream. You scream. I assume that means we're both acquainted with the problem. We proceed.
I'm taking it with a big grain of salt. The article only said that Glaxo would publish information of chemical compounds that have potential to act against the parasite that causes malaria , it didn't say that those are real final drugs that a third-world pharmaceutical factory can take to produce tablets. As anyone in the drug research would know (I'm only a programmer), in order to discover a cure, researchers generate thousands, or even millions, of chemical compounds to study. The majority of them are not useful for anything. They are not publishing information about confirmed hits.
The other thing I'm questioning is the patents. It just said the patents are waived for studying, it didn't say about manufacturing and marketing. What if one of the compound published turned out to be a hit, and Glaxo had patented it. Can others still use it without royalties? What about the IP of any derivatives?
Still a lot of questions to be answered.
I agree, we should take the facts and be thankful.
Oh thank you sir. I'm so greatful sir. Only sir do you think sir that you might find it in your heart sir to not lock up my own genome sir? I was hoping that we who share the genome sir would be able to use it to fight disease sir along with all those other drugs sir that you filed for first sir but you see sir if you lock it up sir many of us will die sir. May I lick your boot now sir?
But seriously, WHY should I be thankful to companies who are behaving badly and manipulating the law so as to maximise their own profits despite the death and suffering it causes, just because they released some small subset of the data? Are you mad? If I am mugged and beaten up should I be thankful that my attacker only laid the boot in 4 times instead of 5?
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
If a drug company is going to open source any type of data, it makes sense to open the most likely to be profitless in the future. With the Bill and Melinda Foundation targeting Malaria as strongly as they are with the intention of giving the vaccination (and possibly cures) away for free, it's really only a matter of time before either the market for the Malaria drugs are worth nothing at all or GSK finds themselves in a 20 year long patent dispute with Bill who has plenty of experience fighting these things.
I'm pretty sure that even if the Gates' family is doing everything more or less for free, they're almost certainly rapidly developing a huge IP pool to use as leverage against companies like GSK in case they find themselves being sued.
On top of that, Malaria related medications are generally targeted at 3rd world countries who depend on WHO and other "charitable government organizations" to wheel and deal to provide the drugs to them. The prices are rapidly driven down and then Indian pharmaceutical companies counterfeit the medications making them worth even less under the "We'd love to buy them from you the legitimate developers of the drug, but at those prices, we might just have to go with the India produced alternative, so take what we're offering or thank you for your time".
GSK could probably give away tons of their cures and save themselves the related headaches under these circumstances just to gain favorable press and have a little more leverage in Washington since they are "no longer evil... see?"
Stuff like that makes me choose a brand when buying things.
Now if whoever bought the company that wanted to free the drugs against the sleeping illness from any IP (which, in turn, bought the company that wanted to free the drugs against the sleeping illness from any IP) would go through with it, a pill that has _no_ economic value to a large megacorp but could be manufactured locally and cure millions of people who are de facto in a coma...
is to invent a cure for malaria. This is because after the work and investment of developing the drug, it will be useful only in the 3rd world, and you'll end up giving the drug away to avoid being called a heartless corporation.
Glaxo has done nothing more than give up drug candidates it had no business interest in developing. Whether the community development model can generate the 800 million dollars worth of preclinical and clinical testing to bring a drug to market remains to be seen.
It's GlaxoSmithKline. One word, not Klein, not glaxco, and CamelCased. It's good people have such strong opinions on a company that they obviously no nothing about and instead prefer to just generalize "I pay too much for prescriptions".