Following on from last week's news from GSK comes a potentially very important announcement from Merck about Sage, a large deposition of biological data and software to the commons. Links and discussion here.
Potentially very interesting news that GSK are looking to provide/find cheaper drugs for underdeveloped countries. From the article:
"[Witty] said that GSK will:
Cut its prices for all drugs in the 50 least developed countries to no more than 25% of the levels in the UK and US – and less if possible – and make drugs more affordable in middle- income countries such as Brazil and India.
Put any chemicals or processes over which it has intellectual property rights that are relevant to finding drugs for neglected diseases into a "patent pool", so they can be explored by other researchers.
There has been an interesting conversation over at Friendfeed about the value of centralised vs. decentralised synthetic procedures for chemistry. i.e. should we try to create a store of chemical reactions, or ought we to be expecting decent search tools to be able to find these for us, wherever they are. From my perspective, both have value. Naturally what we need are tools that understand descriptions of reactions that are semantic (plain English), and which can understand various forms of data that go along with compounds.
The Scott and O'Donnell labs at IUPUI have published an interesting set of articles in the latest issue (vol 11, issue 1) of the Journal of Combinatorial Chemistry on Distributed Drug Discovery. They're open access articles. The idea is to show that chemical synthesis can be done by multiple labs for the creation of drug-like compounds, and that there is reproducibility between the different sites (from the US to Poland). This is obviously an important requirement for any distributed research effort.
Many of you reading and participating at TSL are University scientists at top notch universities. Imagine spreading your knowledge to other briliant people who are geographically challenged.
Imagine giving them the skills to really help in the collaborative process of open source biomedical research for tropical diseases.
Perhaps, http://academicearth.org/ is a platform to help you do that. Check it out. Can you post a lecture or an entire course?
The National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) has funded two centers for conducting structural gemomics studies on Infectious disease organisms.
There are two centers, one called SSGCID (Seattle Structurals Genomics Center for Infectious Diseases) run by Seattle Biomedical Research Institue (SBRI). Another is CSGID (Center for Structural Genomics of Infectious Diseases).
Both centers are seeking target suggestions from the worldwide community. Make target requests at:
We're drawing up a contract (with WHO and the ARC) to cover our new grant (and hence this site). Our business office would like to know which Creative Commons licence is most suitable. I was assuming Attribution 3.0 unported, since this allows sharing and remixing under attribution. On the face of it, a better alternative is Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported, since this also requires that anyone using the research has to distribute their own work under a similar licence.
