Seema Singh writes in a recent Cell article (1):
Open source software may have been around for 17 years, but using an open source model to speed up drug discovery is a relatively new idea. This month, India is launching a new open source initiative for developing drugs to treat diseases such as tuberculosis, malaria, and HIV.
Bernard Munos reports on a similar trend in a Nature review (2):
The low number of novel therapeutics approved by the US FDA in recent years continues to cause great concern about productivity and declining innovation. Can open-source drug research and development, using principles pioneered by the highly successful open-source software movement, help revive the industry?
Stephen Maurer (3) writes:
Despite their novelty and importance, open source methods have been largely been limited to software. However, scholars have long suggested that it would be logical to organize at least one other field - drug discovery - using open source principles. This paper reviews today's relatively tentative attempts to organize open source biology collaborations and argues that more ambitious projects are feasible. Five specific projects are proposed and analyzed in detail. The article concludes by examining the special legal problems of writing open source licenses in the patent-dominated field of biology.
The theme of Open Source Science used for the development of drugs is one that arises often lately. The value for neglected diseases could be immense.
In these reviews, most examples fall short of being truly open in the sense that one normally thinks of Open Source Software. If data are made public, it is generally after an embargo period. Or data are shared, but only within a group of collaborators, who may have to pay to join the consortium.
The signal here is the strong interest in the concept of Open Science as applied to drug development. I don't think that this will abate and look for bottom-up data sharing initiatives to realize some of the objectives of the movement.
Open source software may have been around for 17 years, but using an open source model to speed up drug discovery is a relatively new idea. This month, India is launching a new open source initiative for developing drugs to treat diseases such as tuberculosis, malaria, and HIV.