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Pharma embraces open source models

Nature Biotechnology volume 28, pages 631–633 (2010)Cite this article

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For the pharma industry, the impetus to adopt an open source or open innovation strategy is driven by a need to refocus resources on driving the best compounds through the pipeline and collaborating on those early parts of the drug discovery R&D where problems are shared by other companies and often, indeed, across the industry. Bringing a drug to market, when all failures are added to the ledger, currently costs an astronomical $1.8 billion, according to evidence produced by Bernard Munos and researchers at Eli Lilly Corporate Center in Indianapolis (Nat. Rev. Drug. Discov. 9, 203–214, 2010). This is prompting some—in industry, universities and government—to propose new types of collaboration that attempt to pool resources, with a particular focus on new target biology and biomarker development. As the University of Toronto's Aled Edwards puts it a root cause of our failure to find new drugs is our ignorance of basic biology. “We are trying to discover drugs while we have a really bleak understanding of how basic physiology works and no one organization has the resources to understand it all,” he says.

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    Stephen Strauss

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Strauss, S. Pharma embraces open source models. Nat Biotechnol 28, 631–633 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1038/nbt0710-631

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