Apparently one of the greatest mysteries in science is how to make a science out of drug discovery. ...
What to do to make the system more rational?
Well, [Aled Edwards, head of collaboration between the University of Toronto, the University of Oxford, and Sweden's Karolinska Institute called the Structural Genomics Consortium] and his Swedish and English collaborators are studying the shapes of the body's proteins and then making their results freely available on the internet. It turns out the shape of proteins is vital knowledge when trying to develop a drug to block the actions of some disease causing body molecule. And their view is that this is knowledge that all companies need to have for free as a precursor to drug development.
Their analysis suggests they can reduce early drug discovery time by as much as 18 months and do the work at anywhere from a third to an eighth of the price of traditional academic and industrial research. ...
Posted by
Gavin Baker at 6/04/2008 04:55:00 AM.
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.
