The first public-private partnership aimed at tackling inefficiencies in drug validation to speed up drug discovery held its inaugural brain storming session on February 16. This open access consortium known as Arch2POCM was instigated by University of Toronto biologist Aled Edwards, head of the Structural Genomics Consortium, Stephen Friend of Sage Bionetworks and Chas Bountra, of the University of Oxford. This initiative was set up to move high-risk disease targets to the point of proof of clinical mechanism. That first meeting in Toronto included 43 representatives of industry, academia, regulatory agencies and patient groups (http://www.sagebase.org/partners/Arch2POCM.php). They discussed ways of getting around the privacy and intellectual property (IP) roadblocks that today cause pharma companies to waste time and money repeating experiments with novel compounds their competitors already know will fail. What sets Arch2POCM apart from similar endeavors (Nat. Biotechnol. 28, 631–634, 2010) is their insistence on a practical agenda to implement open sourcing by both the public and private sectors. “Each of our groupings agreed to have one or two people work closely in the development of a business plan,” said Edwards.