Recent Trends in Collaborative, Open Source Drug Discovery

...To overcome the problems in the current landscape and to bridge the innovation gap, pharma needs better strategies for identifying new and novel therapeutic targets, find molecules to probe new drug targets, and smart lead optimization strategies. This has led to development of new business models and increased recognition of “Open Innovation” paradigm, a term initially described by Professor Henry Chesbrough, which now is interpreted as a concept promoting a collaborative and open engagement to introduce external ideas to complement internal ideas for enhancing a company’s internal technology, and to expedite the path to market.

In order to be more profitable and productive, the pharmaceutical industry has embraced an open innovation approach to share the drug discovery processes and data with academia. In its simplest form, the academia contributes to target identification and disease validation research while the pharma steps in and makes the assay HTS ready, and carries on specialized screening campaigns. The goal for a successful collaborative translational research is to ensure that the target is disease relevant, and from a toxicobiology perspective, the compounds against the target have good safety and efficacy profiles...