Open Source Pharma And Prizes

I’m involved in a meeting happening next month in Italy that is asking “Can we develop a new open source pharmaceutical industry?” We’ll be talking amongst other things about incentives (such as prizes) and new ideas for the structure of pharma (legal and economic) and trying to come up with some pilot projects. This post serves as an announcement of the meeting and a description of the agenda – true to the philosophy underlying the idea, the agenda is open to input from anyone (please just comment below). This page may therefore change in response to input from people, so any changes will be tracked.

Context: A while back, when my lab first started working on open source research for neglected tropical diseases, I was contacted by Jaykumar Menon, formerly of the X-Prize and now professor of practice at McGill University. He was interested in whether we’d considered prizes to stimulate activity. This got me to thinking about ways we might be able to combine prizes and completely open ways of working. Jay has now managed to secure funding from the Rockefeller Foundation to host a meeting to start looking at these ideas in detail. It’s taking place at the Rockefeller Bellagio resort on Lake Como, July 2014. Only 23 people can come, and we’re trying to create a diverse mix of attendees from across research, policy and philanthropy...