Three big pharmas—Pfizer, Merck, and Eli Lilly—are pooling their resources to set up an independent nonprofit company to spur research into innovative treatments for cancers common in Asian populations. The new Asian Cancer Research Group (ACRG) will build an open-access pharmacogenomic cancer database, which will be made publicly available to researchers in the field. Wu Jun, vice president of Xiangxue Pharmaceutical, Guangzhou, says, “It will save Western companies time and money and is good news for patients in China.” The joint venture will focus initially on lung and gastric cancers and aims to gather 2,000 tissue samples over the next two years. “ACRG could get more data from Asia and spend less on research compared with what they spend in the West,” says Wu. ACRG is an example of a growing trend in pre-competitive collaborations. The same three companies have done it before with Enlight Biosciences (Nat. Biotechnol. 26, 960–961, 2008), an R&D startup for developing drug discovery tools. The pharma giants are searching for ways to capture the emerging Asian markets. Plans for ACRG were already underway before last year's decision by the Chinese government to invest 850 billion yuan ($125 billion) on healthcare reform, according to a spokesperson for Merck.