Industry Continues Dabbling with Open Innovation Models

On October 26, seven large pharma companies and a biotech firm, Alnylam, announced a collaboration with the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO) to establish WIPO Re:Search. This open innovation initiative lines up United Nations agency WIPO of Geneva with Washington, DC–based BIO Ventures for Global Health, the US National Institutes of Health (NIH), drug companies and academic institutions (Table 1) in an effort to share intellectual property (IP) and resources that can speed drug discovery in 19 neglected tropical diseases, as well as malaria and tuberculosis.

A month earlier, the Indianapolis-based Eli Lilly launched its Open Innovation Drug Discovery initiative, an extension of its earlier free web-based screening tool called Phenotypic Drug Discovery Initiative (PD2). And on November 3, Sanford-Burnham Medical Research Institute, of La Jolla, California, became the latest addition to New York–based Pfizer's Centers for Therapeutic Innovation (CTIs), an open innovation network focusing on biologics, which also offers participating investigators access to certain 'select' Pfizer compound libraries.

Pharma has been tinkering in open-source collaborations (Nat. Biotechnol. 29, 298, 2011) but many in industry remain skeptical. “Let's give it time—but not too much time,” says Werner Lanthaler, CEO of Hamburg, Germany–based drug developer Evotec. “It could end up being something where the long-term cost is small but [where the outcome is also] unproductive.”...