New Startup Hopes to Push Open Source Pharmaceuticals

waderoush writes "Nothing like the open source computing movement has ever caught fire in biology or pharmaceuticals, where intellectual property is king. But drawing inspiration from the people who make Linux software, and the social networking success of Facebook, Merck's cancer research leader has nailed down $5 million to launch a nonprofit biology platform called Sage, which aims to make it easier for researchers around the world to pool their data to make better drugs. 'We see this becoming like the Google of biological science. It will be such an informative platform, you won't be able to make decisions without it,' says Merck's Eric Schadt, a co-founder of Sage. He adds: 'We want this to be like the Internet. Nobody owns it.'"

Re:Oh, please.

[dkleinsc]

Next thing you know you're going to be suggesting that ordinary herbs are perfectly good for helping people sleep [wikipedia.org] or combating migraines [wikipedia.org] too.

Hippie, commie, open sources will never learn indeed.

Re:The big OPEN SOURCE project that I see iseducat

[Anonymous Coward]

Although something of the scope that you describe certainly does not exist yet, there are projects along those lines. The main such projects I know of are MIT's OpenCourseWare [mit.edu], which apparently has spread to some other universities (Wikipedia page [wikipedia.org]). In a similar, but currently much smaller project, Cornell has begun putting videos of some lectures online [videonote.net], but it appears to be only for Cornell students. Hopefully that will change.

Getting away from just college-level materials, there are a lot of collections of free textbooks, as revealed by a quick Google search [google.com] (and remembering from prior Slashdot discussions on the topic), but I am not familiar with any of of them, so I do not know which ones are actually worth looking at. Specifically, the Wikibooks [wikibooks.org] sister project to Wikipedia and its subproject (which I had not seen before) Wikijunior [wikibooks.org] may interest you.

I am not sure how you feel about the MediaWiki projects, but that seems like a natural place to put in your efforts. If not, perhaps one of those other links may point you towards a project you are interested in helping with. Depending on how complete and high quality the existing material is, a better project might be one of making easier to find and encouraging people to actually use free educational materials, which could lead to more people contributing to those projects.

Not "open source pharmaceuticals"

[Ungrounded Lightning]

When I saw the title I thought "How the HELL can you have 'open source pharmaceuticals' in a legal regime where new drug compounds are illegal by default?"

Then I read TFA.

This has NOTHING to do with making "open source pharmaceuticals". This is about sharing data among drug companies and doctors to try to get a better handle on things like:
  - understanding the gene-regulation changes that occur in major diseases
  - designing better drugs using this data
  - customizing drug therapies by selecting drugs that are a good match for a patient's genetics and disease, picking those that will be safe and effective for him in particular while avoiding those that would cause dangerous side-effects due to his particular genetics.

It looks like it will run afoul of HIPPA unless it's very carefully designed.

BAD article title. No donut.

Open source computing in Biology

[Adam Hazzlebank]

Nothing like the open source computing movement has ever caught fire in biology or pharmaceuticals

Informatics for Biology... Bioinformatics. Is RUN by open source software. BLAST http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BLAST [wikipedia.org] ,one of the most important Bioinformatic tools ever written, is public domain. It's paper is one of the most cited of the past 30 years http://archive.sciencewatch.com/sept-oct2003/sw_sept-oct2003_page1.htm [sciencewatch.com] . Bioinformatic clusters almost universally run Linux. Almost all popular tools are written by academics and supplied under open source licenses. To the degree that I'd say closed source software finds it hard to break in to this area, not the other way round. This is not only true of Bioinformatics, but also large scale Protein simulations. Namd p://www.ks.uiuc.edu/Research/namd/ is also available under and open source (though more restrictive than GPL or BSD license). And is one of the most popular Molecular Dynamics codes available.

Re:Not enough to do anything really.

[jackchance]

Sage is not a research project, it will not conduct trials. it is a data-mining project. They idea is simply to create a standard API so that all the current research will be more effective. The $5M is just to get the thing off the ground. As soon as it has a single success, the funding will flow like water.