Lilly’s Grid Goes Open Source

Kevin Davies | BioITWorld.com | July 14, 2008

 In an unusual move for big pharma, Eli Lilly has made its Discovery IT platform—known internally as the Lilly Science Grid (LSG)—open source . . . The move addresses a key question: “Do [biopharma] all really need to manage very similar resources or are there areas where we can work together?” . . . Says, Susie Stephens, principal research scientist with Lilly.

“We don’t think it makes financial sense for all pharma and biotech companies to all be developing a core discovery IT framework... I’m not aware of a huge number of projects where pharma is making code available open source,” adds Stephens. She cites PISTOIA—a new initiative to share data models, and web-service interfaces in areas such as cheminformatics, which is also available through Sourceforge.