Stephen Friend and Eric Schadt came to Merck & Co. in 2001 when the drug company purchased Rosetta Inpharmatics. They will be leaving this summer and taking with them a data-packed 10,000-processor computer cluster at Rosetta's facilities in Seattle.
Friend and Schadt are launching Sage Bionetwork, an open-platform database for sharing and disseminating complex disease biology data. What's spurred them is the massive influx of biological data in drug research and the need for collaboration in understanding the biological mechanisms of disease. ...
"We are headed toward a clinical genomic Tower of Babel where people each have their own view of what's going on and can't talk to each other," Friend says. "The reason I am leaving Merck is that I fundamentally believe we need a different mechanism, a space between the private and public sectors that will reward people for sharing and that will make disease biology a precompetitive space." ...
Friend says Merck's willingness to share the data in Seattle with other research organizations by simply handing it over to Sage is an indication that large drug companies are becoming more willing to work collaboratively and are beginning to broaden the definition of public, precompetitive data. "I don't think the pharmaceutical industry is willing to share compound data," he says, "but it is willing to share disease biology data."
Sage intends to expand its data center through partnerships. Its first partner, the Fred Hutchinson/University of Washington Cancer Consortium, is local. But Schadt envisions partnerships worldwide. The group is in talks with the Wellcome Trust, in London, and with potential partners in China. Sage's tentative launch date is July 1.
See also another story in the same issue on the use of cloud computing for research, including its use at Sage and comments by John Wilbanks.
... [Q:] Do you see signs within pharma that pre-competitive sharing can gather momentum?
I think it is and it isn’t... People are waking up: Oh my god, I don’t know what to do with the data. Where they are not willing to be pre-competitive is when they start in with strategies. People have made a mistake in trying to get companies to cooperate when they absolutely need to have an advantage and to have something that’s theirs. That split between what is and what’s not pre-competitive has gotten garbled. Why won’t pharma companies work together? That’s the wrong argument. ...
Posted by
Gavin Baker at 5/26/2009 02:22:00 PM.
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.
