[sc-announce] WSJ: Putting Drug Discovery in Patients' Hands -- Science Commons

Donna Wentworth dwentworth at creativecommons.org
Tue Jul 29 12:25:02 EDT 2008


WSJ: Putting Drug Development in Patients'
Hands<http://sciencecommons.org/weblog/archives/2008/07/29/wsj-putting-drug-development-in-patients-hands/>
July
29th, 2008

*The **Wall Street Journal* has an article today featuring Marty
Tenenbaum<http://wiki.commerce.net/wiki/Marty_Tenenbaum>and
CollabRx <http://collabrx.com/>, one of our partners in the Health
Commons<http://sciencecommons.org/projects/healthcommons/>project. The
piece,
*Putting Drug Development in Patients'
Hands*<http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121727953947391015.html>,
explores how patients are using the Internet to take the reins in developing
drugs for disease — especially rare and neglected diseases for which drug
discovery has yet to prove commercially viable. Among the strategies
patients are pursuing:  funding their own "virtual" pharmaceutical
companies, tasked to specific diseases.

One patient profiled in the article, Bonnie J. Addario, is a lung-cancer
survivor who turned to CollabRx for help. Addario began the search for a
cure using the traditional approach. But after raising $800, 000 through a
foundation and distributing it to researchers, she came to the realization
that despite the hard work going into the research, lung-cancer survival
rates hadn't changed in 40 years. So Addario and her husband convened a
conference with researchers to uncover hidden roadblocks:

[The] group identified a number of problems that hinder progress toward a
cure. Among them: Researchers didn't know what others were doing, tissue and
blood specimens needed for experiments weren't centrally located or shared,
and the findings of experiments weren't integrated to help assess what the
key priorities should be.

The Health Commons, also discussed in the article, was launched to help make
it easier for anyone to pull together the resources necessary for advancing
disease research, without the legal wrangling commonly associated with
securing access to research, data and unique research materials like cell
lines. This includes implementing standardized, machine-readable
agreements<http://sciencecommons.org/projects/licensing/>to facilitate
intra-academic and academic-industry transfer of biological
materials.

"The Health Commons is creating the legal and technical foundation for a
friction-free, point-and-click marketplace like Amazon or eBay, so disease
research isn't bogged down by needlessly complicated, costly legal
negotiations," explains John
Wilbanks<http://creativecommons.org/about/people/#34>,
who leads Science Commons. "Some resources may be freely available; others
may be available for a fee. But if it's in the Health Commons, it will be a
swift, permissionless transaction, because permission will have already been
granted."

Our founding partners in the Health Commons are CollabRx<http://collabrx.com/>,
CommerceNet <http://www.commerce.net/> and the Public Library of
Science<http://www.plos.org/>
.
 <http://collabrx.com/>

To learn more about the Health Commons, visit the project
page<http://sciencecommons.org/projects/healthcommons/>,
where you'll find a white paper co-authored by Wilbanks and Tenenbaum, plus
a 6-minute video introduction to the project.
 <http://collabrx.com/>
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