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Glaxo Open Sources Malaria Drug Search Data

Posted by samzenpus on from the free-as-a-mosquito dept.

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."

23 of 80 comments (clear)

  1. Start of something by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:Start of something by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

      I'll be cautiously, quietly applauding from a far corner, until I can figure out what exactly their ulterior motives are. They want my trust, and this is a good first step, but boy-oh-boy do they have an uphill battle before them.

    2. Re:Start of something by shipbrick · · Score: 5, Insightful

      I agree, we should take the facts and be thankful. Whatever their true motives, we do not know (perhaps they just don't think they'll ever profit from malaria drugs, etc). We'll see how many negative comments regarding this are posted... But before that happens, I'd advise readers to always be skeptical, but never cynical.

    3. Re:Start of something by hedwards · · Score: 2, Insightful

      I'm not surprised they'd be doing this with malaria drugs given who they're targeting with them they're not particularly profitable. I wouldn't be surprised if they try this with antibiotics next. Neither set of drugs are particularly profitable and are done mainly as a community service.

    4. Re:Start of something by somenickname · · Score: 2, Interesting

      (perhaps they just don't think they'll ever profit from malaria drugs, etc)

      And there you have it. Most of the countries where Malaria is prevalent are not rich countries. However, most people have heard the word Malaria and, even if they don't know what it is or how you get it, this announcement sounds impressive to them. Dengue Fever is also common in many of the areas of the world where Malaria is but they aren't releasing that research. Why? Because no one has heard of it so it's not an effective PR stunt.

    5. Re:Start of something by surmak · · Score: 2, Interesting

      I'll be cautiously, quietly applauding from a far corner, until I can figure out what exactly their ulterior motives are. They want my trust, and this is a good first step, but boy-oh-boy do they have an uphill battle before them.

      Their motives are pretty clear: malaria effects half a billion people a year, but they are mostly poor and in poor countries. This way Glaxo is able to outsource the R&D, and get good PR (and maybe do some good for the world at the same time).

      Meanwhile, their scientists can focus on the very profitable lifestyle drugs (e.g Viagara, Procieca), and drugs for conditions that effect the rich (high blood pressure, depression, diabetes, and the like).

    6. Re:Start of something by grcumb · · Score: 3, Informative

      (perhaps they just don't think they'll ever profit from malaria drugs, etc)

      And there you have it. Most of the countries where Malaria is prevalent are not rich countries. However, most people have heard the word Malaria and, even if they don't know what it is or how you get it, this announcement sounds impressive to them. Dengue Fever is also common in many of the areas of the world where Malaria is but they aren't releasing that research. Why? Because no one has heard of it so it's not an effective PR stunt.

      The other reason for not releasing research on Dengue is that there is currently no treatment available whatsoever (unless you count liquids and Panadol to reduce the fever).

      Being the first company to provide a viable treatment is a very attractive prospect. I know this because I just got over a bout of Dengue a couple of months ago, and I would have paid really good money for a treatment. In fact, when I was waiting for my blood test results, I quietly prayed that I had malaria, because although it's a bitch, with treatment it's over quickly. Dengue just has to run its course.

      So yes: No profit from malaria? Open source it. Big profit from Dengue? Keep your cards to your chest.

      --
      Crumb's Corollary: Never bring a knife to a bun fight.
    7. Re:Start of something by hjf · · Score: 2, Insightful

      greetings from Chaco, Argentina, where we've been having dengue outbreaks lately (a couple of times a year there's a day when government asks you to go into your backyard (you can refuse, of course) to check if you have anything where mosquitos could reproduce -- tires, jars, etc. it's more about teaching the poor people.
      we've also had city-wide fumigations (according to my neighbor, who does that for a living, it's pretty much useless). but it's kinda fun looking at the trucks with speakers yelling that this is good for us, open the doors and windows, let the poison in (!), spraying everything, and that weird, heavy mist that floats just above the ground... it's like a movie.

      also, you forgot to mention Chagas disease.

      but now seriously, last year we had the Influenza A "outbreak" when everybody panicked and said the government isnt doing anything to protect us... so this year they spent a couple of hundreds of millions for the vaccine. but today no one remembers (or cares) about Influenza A.

      so in short, some countries are willing to spend lots of money if they make a good enough PR stunt. so i still wonder why they're releasing all this data. maybe it's too old? maybe it's nearly useless? I mean we have the diseases here. we do (believe or not) have R&D and all. I mean we're a country with nuclear research. We build and sell nuclear reactors to Australia, and we have our own sources of nuclear fuel (still wonder why the US lets us do that. of course we don't have their permission to use that for weapons), really, I was surprised with this news.

    8. Re:Start of something by somenickname · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Interestingly enough, my knowledge of Dengue only comes from living in Argentina for the last 10 years and remembering it being big in the papers a year or two ago before I left. The reason that millions of dollars can be appropriated to treat something like Influenza A is that a vaccine exists. And it exists because it also affects rich countries that can shell out enough money to make the R&D worth the investment.

    9. Re:Start of something by PDoc · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Speaking from the inside of a large pharma company, I can tell you that there is currently *a lot* of interest in Dengue. Several of the biggest drug-companies are beginning programmes aimed at Dengue, and funding bodies are proposing collaborative efforts. It's a (very) long way from a viable treatment, but the people at the top can see the money now... which helps.

      --
      Give a man a fire, and he's warm for a day. Set a man on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life. (Terry Pratchett)
  2. Linux approach? by MichaelSmith · · Score: 3, Funny

    Oh to be a fly on the wall when RMS reads that.

    --
    http://michaelsmith.id.au
  3. Old News by methano · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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.

    1. Re:Old News by Sarten-X · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Outside of the pharmaceutical world, this is still better than nothing.

      --
      You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
    2. Re:Old News by shipbrick · · Score: 2, Insightful

      I'd guess they are also willing to provide samples, but I don't know. Anyhow, in the research world, a picture of a molecule is just as good to an medicinal and/or organic chemist, they can figure out how to synthesize it themselves and perhaps they might even be able to get some help by looking at the patents. Some medicinal chemists make tons of molecules for a purpose, only to find out they don't have any activity. This info would allow them to start with a parent compound they know will have some activity. They can then expand and make analogs potentially discovering new chemistry (tools) in the process. They would then likely try to make 'better' compounds while they or a biologist can try to find out the mechanism of how the compounds kill malaria. Even if this doesn't yield a cure, figuring out these mechanisms can serendipitously progress science, and we can learn even from the misses. In science, it's common to go down a road and find a dead end, but at least then we can put up a sign and tell others to avoid that road, so they can go down a different road in hope of finding whatever it is we are looking for (malaria treatments in this case). The more knowledge we obtain, the better our chances are...

    3. Re:Old News by AHuxley · · Score: 2, Interesting

      What they could do is donate a factory to pump out cheap, safe anti parasite like meds (eg guinea worm, river blindness, trachoma, lymphatic filariasis, schistosomiasis).
      One tablet per child, a clinic to monitor the meds and a community is a bit better off even with bad water.
      Less sick children, staying in school for a very low state cost.
      They have then have the option to study hard, enter politics, mining and consider the needs for quality local private pharmaceutical enterprise.
      Slowly they may reshape their countries into export driven economies pushing the post colonial, cold war loan based slavery.
      Hmmmm, long term best just to publish 13,500 chemical compounds from the library.

      --
      Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
  4. You are not supposed to say that. by GNUALMAFUERTE · · Score: 2, Insightful

    '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?
  5. makes me wonder by youn · · Score: 2, Interesting

    _ 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 :p
  6. Re:Its because there's no money in it by mirix · · Score: 2, Interesting

    This was my thought as well, give it away because good PR is worth more than the drugs would be worth.

    Nevertheless, I still think it's a positive decision. Would be nice if we could get an open sourced drug for cancer or heart disease by the time I need it, though. (cancer and heart disease being the top two killers in the developed world, and all).

    --
    Sent from my PDP-11
  7. The birth of GlaxOSS ? by freaker_TuC · · Score: 2, Insightful

    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..
  8. Drug leads are cheap. this profits glaxo by goombah99 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.
  9. Already published last week in Nature by ChefJoe · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.

  10. Taking it with a big grain of salt by 2Bits · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.

  11. Thankful my left boot! by syousef · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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