Interview: An Open Source Approach to Medical Research

This is the second in a series of interviews where we speak with leading innovators who are appropriating lessons from open source thinking—once purely the domain of the software engineer—for social change.

Stephen Friend is an Ashoka Fellow in the United States working to transform the culture and practice of closed information systems present in biomedical research to align with and support health outcomes by establishing a commons. He is president of Sage Bionetworks.

Roshan Paul and Alexa Clay: What is the problem with the current health care research and development (R&D) community, and how are you addressing it? Stephen Friend: The medical information system is closed. Scientists get funded to generate data, then they publish it, and only then do they talk about it. The same is true for R&D in pharmaceutical and biotech companies. The current system is a primitive model, a sort of hunter-gatherer approach. A single researcher or closed team of researchers go after a molecular target or cure in isolation. It’s a them-against-the-world mentality. The “medical-industrial complex” is not incentivized to share amongst each other, let alone with patients.