Open Access News

News from the open access movement


Thursday, April 30, 2009

More on open data from Sage

Harnessing open innovation, Nature Reviews Drug Discovery, May 2009.  Accessible only to subscribers. (Thanks to Garrett Eastman.)   Excerpt:

On 1 July 2009, the incubation phase of a new open-access platform called Sage should begin. With logistical support and data from Merck and seed money from private sources, Eric Schadt and co-founder Stephen Friend — who are both moving from senior positions at Merck — aim to build complex, predictive models of disease. “The idea is to integrate large-scale biological information into models and then enable other scientists to leverage that information in an open-access way (freely available with no intellectual property restrictions),” says Schadt....

Sage aims to harness the kind of computing power used by internet information providers such as Google to enable researchers worldwide to iterate disease models and transform our understanding of disease biology....

Whereas Sage and CollabRx are among the most recent open-innovation initiatives, several other drug development challenges, such as biomarker identification and validation, are increasingly being addressed at a pre-competitive level, often through public–private partnerships (Table 1). Later this year, the consortia that will answer the first calls of the Innovative Medicines Initiative (IMI), the largest such public–private partnership to date, will be officially announced. The research tools that emerge from the IMI will be made available to other companies and academic groups for research purposes at a reasonable cost or free of charge, although the IP rights will belong to members of each consortium (Nature Rev. Drug Discov. 7, 548–549; 2008).

The issue of who should own the IP generated by such pre-competitive initiatives has been the subject of considerable debate....

PS:  Also see our past posts on Sage and pre-competitive sharing.