Open Source Biology

Could patent restrictions in biotech be compromising millions' health, safety, and standards of living when we should be benefiting from new diagnostic tests or improved medicines?

We're living in a time of technological explosion in biology, medicine, and genetics. Gene sequencing efforts are going on all over the world. We've amassed mountains of data: biological data, genome sequences, results of experiments, and clinical trials. But the genome biobanks have been sitting mostly idle. Individual groups are working to figure out how to make all this data useful, but this work is mostly going on in silos, information is rarely shared and certainly not in any optimal way.

This data has the potential to make a profound impact on healthcare, disease control, longevity, and perhaps even personalized medicine for patients, based on their own unique genetic sequences.

"We need to establish disruptive incentives for researchers, industry and the public to work together in fundamentally news ways to accelerate meaningful improvements in healthcare," says Stephen Friend, M.D., Ph.D., founder of nonprofit Sage Bionetworks.