Companies And Open Science

There is an argument that says we should not be making simple compounds in academic research labs, but rather using specialist services to make molecules with which we then do interesting science. There is a lot of truth to that, particularly with medchem projects involving structures that are simple, or for which there is synthetic precedent. We’re making compounds in my lab as part of the open source drug discovery for malaria project because we’re trying to drive a unique way of doing things in the open and show that that works, but if everyone started doing open source drug discovery, and it became the standard way of doing things, I wonder if the process would be more efficient if we used a network of CROs, or even a set of super-labs specializing in synthesis (a proposal I’m thinking about, but I can’t decide whether it should be government- or industry funded). I think Elizabeth Iorns of Science Exchange has mentioned this idea too.

The potential for CROs to make an impact on open projects is great. This is because an open source project consists of a nimble network. In regular research projects, funded by government grants, one will typically define the project structure at the start, cost up the resources, and then carry out that research in a manner that is closely related to the proposal. Naturally there will be variations in science and approach, but there are usually not huge variations in the structure of the team. [...]