[sc-announce] Galapagos NV: drug discovery innovator -- Science Commons blog

Donna Wentworth dwentworth at creativecommons.org
Thu Jul 24 09:57:30 EDT 2008


Galapagos NV: drug discovery innovator

July 24th, 2008 <http://sciencecommons.org/?p=360> by dwentworth

Not long ago, GlaxoSmithKline (GSK <http://www.gsk.com/>) made headlines
with its "Massive Cancer Information
Giveaway<http://blog.wired.com/wiredscience/2008/06/massive-cancer.html>":
a gift of over 300 proprietary cell lines derived from a wide variety of
tumors, including breast, prostate, lung and ovarian cancers. The cell lines
were made freely available to cancer researchers via the National Cancer
Institute's caBIG <https://cabig.nci.nih.gov/>, with the goal of
"crowdsourcing" the search for predictive biomarkers, making clinical trials
shorter and, ultimately, getting drugs more quickly to people suffering from
disease.

Now Galapagos NV <http://www.glpg.com/>, a Belgium-based drug discovery
company, is following in GSK's footsteps. The company is making freely
available several proprietary databases of information about small molecules
and proteins through the EMBL <http://www.embl.org/>'s European
Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI). With funding from the Wellcome Trust,
EMBL-EBI is returning the data to the public
domain<http://www.embl.de/aboutus/news/press/press08/23jul08/index.html>—
precisely what we recommend in the Science
Commons Open Access Data
Protocol<http://sciencecommons.org/projects/publishing/open-access-data-protocol/>
.

"This makes the scientific data that Galapagos has gathered an extraordinary
gift — not just to science, but to open science," says John
Wilbanks<http://creativecommons.org/about/people/#34>,
who leads Science Commons. "Returning the data to the public domain removes
the legal barriers that prevent us from making full use of the latest
technologies for data integration and analysis. The Galapagos data can now
be used in ways no one can anticipate — the very definition of innovation."

................
 Donna Wentworth
Communications Specialist
Science Commons
http://sciencecommons.org
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