Open Source Sesame

Last week, the folks at the Center for Global Health R and D Policy Assessment, a subgroup of the policy contract firm, Results for Development Institute, made public their draft study of the topic, “Open Source for Neglected Diseases” (CGHRDPA Report) and invited comment.  While the report is a good start, I opine that it doesn’t address the fundamental limitations of the open source approach as applied to drug development and, as I have written about the Center’s previous two draft assessments (my posting of 12/9/10), doesn’t reflect the years of experience of the biotech/pharma industry in playing the drug development game.

First, the good start is that the authors do a laudable job of covering a large and diverse field of ideas and efforts, and their summary of the open source “initiatives” on pages 6-9 and 19-20 is comprehensive but lacks, as the authors later note (page 17), an assessment of the initiatives’ output and cost effectiveness.  The authors also missed two software platforms that are available and are being used for neglected disease drug development, specifically, HEOS by Scynexis (Scynexis and my posting of 11/4/10) and OpenClinica by Akaza Research (OpenClinica) and an initiative, the Distributed Drug Discovery Project at the University of Indiana/Purdue University (D3).