Back in June 2008 GlaxoSmithKline the world’s second largest drug maker, effectively gave away $millions(?) worth of research data as a donation to open source drug discovery.
Mainly ignored by the mainstream media at first, this massive move by a big player for the pharma industry signals a change in how these large companies are viewing the way they handle and share knowledge to boost the the collaborative battle against disease.
A spokesperson from GSK said “In turn, we hope this data will further drive the identification of predictive biomarkers and lead to shorter, more directed clinical trials allowing us to bring drugs more quickly to patients who need them.”
Billions of dollars and who knows how many years worth of data are locked up in pharmaceutical companies. This consists of failed research, discontinued research, acquired data (from take overs and mergers) and dark data (the data that doesn’t need to get reported). This is an encouraging move by a respected pharma giant and we’ll be keeping a close eye on industry to see what happens next….
Read the full article at: http://sciencecommons.org/weblog/archives/2008/06/25/gsk-cabig-give-away-cancer-data-to-speed-research/
Tags: pharma