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Symposium Reports on Open Source Drug Discovery

Beakers and test tubes (Horia Varlan/Flickr)A day-long symposium today at the American Chemical Society national meeting in Boston, Massachusetts reports on efforts to lift the secrecy often surrounding drug discovery.

This new approach known as open-source drug discovery connects an online worldwide community that collaborates on discovering and developing new drugs. This combination of movement and work program has the potential at least of developing inexpensive drugs for a host of diseases, including tuberculosis and malaria that afflict large numbers in developing countries.

The symposium features panels and speakers from industry, academia, and non-government organizations, as well as collaborative drug-discovery initiatives. Javier Gamo reports on GlaxoSmithKline’s open-source malaria drug discovery project. Marta Pineiro-Nunez discusses the Phenotypic Drug Discovery Initiative at Eli Lilly and Company. Sean Ekins tells about a software platfom developed by his company, Collaborative Drug Discovery Inc. of Burlingame, California, that enables the sharing of drug databases over the Web.

Two symposium participants report on the Open Source Drug Discovery Consortium (OSDD) based in India. OSDD applies the open-source model pioneered in information technology to drug discovery. Participants collaborate on common projects, organizing the large, complex problems into teams that complete work packages, from the identification of targets through clinical development.

Photo: Horia Varlan/Flickr

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