A decade ago, the Linux operating system helped spark a revolution in how
software is developed. A move by GlaxoSmithKline PLC could test how well
similar open-source principles work for developing new drugs.
The pharmaceutical giant last week opened to the public the designs behind
13,500 chemical compounds that it said may be capable of inhibiting the
parasite that causes malaria.
Glaxo and others hope that sharing information and working together will
lead scientists to come up with a drug for treating the mosquito-borne
disease faster than the company could on its own. Other researchers "may
look at these structures in quite a different way and see something that we
don't," said Nick Cammack, head of Glaxo's Medicines Development Campus in
Spain.
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GlaxoSmithKline
Two government websites and one private site will host Glaxo's data. Above,
containers used by Glaxo researchers to test the effect that chemical
compounds have on the malaria parasite.
The move is one of the largest experiments yet by the pharmaceutical
industry to apply techniques of open-source development to drug discovery,
based on the idea that collaboration by volunteers will create products that
aren't owned by a single company.
In software, the approach has spawned the Linux operating system, MySQL
database and an array of other programs. Those community-born technologies
now compete with products from Microsoft Corp., Oracle Corp. and other
traditional, commercial software makers. Open-source developers share
programming instructions called source code that software companies
traditionally kept confidential.
Similarly, large pharmaceutical companies tightly guard their formulas for
drugs and other intellectual property. Any given chemical compound holds the
potential to be a blockbuster drug—and a cash cow, like Microsoft's Windows
software. But diseases like malaria afflict mainly poor populations, and
drugs to treat them don't hold the promise for such a big payoff—making
experiments like Glaxo's less risky.
The Glaxo effort builds off earlier open-source drug efforts that included a
nonprofit organization called Tropical Disease Initiative and a project
started last year that opens compounds from Pfizer Inc. to researchers at a
nonprofit called Drugs for Neglected Disease Initiative.
The Glaxo data will be hosted by three websites, two of which are
government-funded (one in the U.S. and one in Europe). The third is a
Silicon Valley company called Collaborative Drug Discovery Inc. CDD, as it
is called, was spun off in 2004 from drug maker Eli Lilly & Co. and has
funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and Founders Fund, a
venture-capital firm.
CDD's Web service combines elements of a Facebook-like social network with
an Oracle-style database. Any researcher who registers on the CDD site will
be able to see graphical depictions of Glaxo's compounds and relevant
chemical and biological data. The database will allow them to upload their
own data to be viewed by other researchers.
The service is free of charge. If a researcher wants to combine the data
with proprietary information, CDD alsooffers a fee-based, secure version of
its site that allows researchers to lock up information they want to keep
secret.
Developing a new drug is a trial-and-error process of testing which chemical
compounds produce a certain effect on a biological target. In the case of
malaria, the target can be the Plasmodium parasite that causes the deadly
disease or human red-blood cells that it needs to survive. Over the past
year, Glaxo has tested two million compounds, culling the 13,500 molecules
that it says have some effect. However, narrowing down the compounds to a
handful that might yield a drug is an increasingly complex process.Any
compound that proves promising in the current effort will take years of
testing and investment to turn it into a malaria drug.
Glaxo says that it won't seek patents on any malaria drug that the compounds
yield, and hopes other researchers will also donate their intellectual
property to a patent pool for so-called neglected diseases like malaria. If
the Glaxo compounds are used to develop a drug for other types of diseases,
then the company "would consider" the intellectual-property issues, a Glaxo
spokeswoman said.
Researchers including James McKerrow, a professor at the University of
California, San Francisco, have used CDD since 2007 to share data about
diseases including malaria and schistosomiasis, a parasite that can cause
liver and kidney damage. The group shared data on tens of thousands of
compounds to speed up the process of picking a handful of compounds (for
diseases such as malaria) that are the best options to try on animals, Dr.
McKerrow said.
Barry Bunin, CDD's chief executive, believes that the work on neglected
diseases is a precursor for big pharmaceutical companies to eventually use
the open-source techniques for developing commercial drugs.
Some drug experts doubt that will happen. The reasons include the nettlesome
problem of managing intellectual property and various uncertainties. Any
given compound, for example, could wind up affecting more diseases than
expected and turn out to be more valuable than expected. Glaxo, for
instance, found that drugs that inhibited growth of the parasite that causes
malaria were of a type that is also marketed to treat cancer.
"I think that's a potentially interesting model but I don't think for-profit
institutions would participate," says Brendan O'Leary, general partner at
Prism Venture Management, a venture-capital firm that invests in
life-sciences companies.
Yet Glaxo'sMr. Cammack doesn't rule it out. He hopes the open-source work
will influence Glaxo more broadly in the future, particularly given the
challenges big pharmaceuticalcompanies face in launching new drugs. "The
pharmaceutical industry needs to look at lots of ways of doing business in
the future," he said.
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Harisankar P S,
Computer Science and Engineering 2012,
College of Engineering Chengannur.
