Social Machinery

GlaxoSmithKline, The pharmaceutical giant, has decided to open to public the design of 13,500 chemical compounds that could inhibit malaria, In order to foster collaboration among scientists and researchers interested on developing a drug that can control this disease. The malaria is a condition caused by parasites which are transmitted to the human blood through a mosquito bite. It is one of the world’s biggest health problems with more than 210 million cases annually. Most of these cases affect poor countries where people live with less than 1USD per day.

Given the difficulty of finding an effective medicine to combat the disease, Glaxo has adopted an open-source strategy, inspired by the revolution generated by Linux then years back. Linux was the first operating system, where software developers can share programming instructions called source code that software companies traditionally kept confidential. After one decade, Linux is a competitive solution in a market initially dominated by walled-garden companies like Microsoft.

The drug has released its formula to help others in the process, and to reach a solution faster. Working together will lead scientists to come up with a drug faster than the company could on its own.  ”Other researchers may look these structures in a different way and see something we do not,” said Nick Cammack, Head of Drug Development Area of Glaxo in Spain.

The move is one of the largest experiments yet by the pharmaceutical industry to apply techniques of open-source development to drug discovery, based on the idea that collaboration by volunteers will create products that aren’t owned by a single company

This is a big paradigm shift for pharmaceuticals and obviously Glaxo is taking a financial risk by revealing its formula to everyone including competitors. The pharmaceutical industry is very secretive about their drugs formula as any successful results in a large volume of sales. Usually those researches take a long period of time and investment that is capitalized through a patent that give pharmaceuticals the ability to monetize the new drug for several years in a monopolist situation.

However, this time the race for finding a cure seems more important than the mere economic interest as malaria itself is a typical condition from poor countries, which minimizes the impact on revenue losses for the company. Glaxo has made clear it does not seek patents for any drug against malaria that comes from their compounds, and hoped that other researchers also donate their intellectual property in combating the disease.

The data gathered for this project will be hosted under two government websites and one private site. The private site will be hosted by Silicon Valley Company called Collaborative Drug Discovery Inc. or CDD. Their website is some sort of Facebook for scientist and researchers to collaborate, where any registered scientist will be able to see relevant chemical information about Glaxo’s compounds. Also researchers will be able to upload their own data to be shared with other fellows. The service is free of charge.

Still most of analysts are skeptical about the sustainability of open-source models in the pharmaceutical industry mainly because the unexpected implications of those research into profit-drugs. What happens if during this research, scientists also found a drug that can treat more effectively kidney cancer? Who will own the intellectual property to commercialize the new drug?

Anyway, this is a big change in the way big pharmaceuticals could face the future and create more affordable drugs in a faster time.