"Open Source" Drug Development Company Launched 140
First time accepted submitter awjourn writes "During his years working in pharma R&D, Tomasz Sablinski was frustrated by the industry's need for secrecy and its utter inability to design patient-friendly drug trials. So he founded Transparency Life Sciences, a company that's developing three drugs based on input from patients and physicians, who log onto the company's site and voice their opinions about how drugs should be designed and tested."
Re:Careful... (Score:2, Informative)
the current drug development systems are horribly inefficient , they resemble what programmers would conceder "brute force" methods, try almost everything you can see what has an effect and go from there. At each step were you might want to improve the drug only use understanding based approaches only if all else fails. This used to work much better, the diseases that we where trying to treat where simpler and our understanding worse, but as modern technology advances this methodology becomes more wastefull. Part of the problem is that understanding how a drug works gives your rivals a way of making alternatives so is unattractive unless you have no other option, but there is a lot of inertia involved as well. This is not their only problem but it is a massive issue and they should be able to save a lot of time and money by starting from understanding instead.