Research collaborations, transparency, and data in the public domain are essential to new drug development, according to a structural biologist who spoke at the American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting here on Saturday.
The University of Toronto’s Aled Edwards, who is also the director and the chief executive officer of a not-for-profit group called the Structural Genomics Consortium, warned that the predominant methods of drug research and discovery are too patent heavy, leading to duplicated effort and lost opportunities for significant productivity....
“Intellectual property is killing the process of drug discovery,” [Edwards said].
Edwards said there is hope for structural genomics in aiding drug development — but only if academia, industry, and funding bodies collaborate and keep new structural data accessible to all researchers who might be interested in using it.
The Structural Genomics Consortium, formed in 2004, is an international organization with centers in Canada, the United Kingdom, and Sweden. It was created with the goal of determining the three dimensional structure of all medically relevant proteins through collaborations and partnerships....
At the moment, Edwards noted, the SGC has $30 million in funding from groups as varied as the Canadian government and pharmaceutical companies like GlaxoSmithKline, Merck, and Novartis.
And, like the NIH-funded Protein Structure Initiative, the Structural Genomics Consortium puts a great deal of emphasis on keeping data in the public domain. To date, the group has reportedly contributed to adding more than 500 new protein structures to the Protein Data Bank....
Posted by
Peter Suber at 2/18/2008 03:27:00 PM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
