pharmaceutical

See the following -

ACTA Goes Too Far, Says MEP

Charles Arthur | The Guardian | February 1, 2012

The French MEP who resigned his position in charge of negotiating the international Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) has said it "goes too far" by potentially cutting access to lifesaving generic drugs and restricting internet freedom.

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Could Open Source Principles Revolutionize Drug Development?

Sam Dean | OStatic | February 24, 2012

...a startup company is applying open source principles to, of all things, drug development. Transparency Life Sciences may have a shot at invoving patients in drug development in unprecedented ways, and could usher in innovative ways to speed up the clinical trials process.

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Crowd-Sourcing Drug Discovery

Pallave Bagla | Science Magazine | February 24, 2012

Each year, India tallies 1.7 million cases of tuberculosis (TB) and some 400,000 people succumb to the disease, making it the leading cause of death for those in the prime of life, from 15 to 45 years old. Most victims are poor, and pharmaceutical companies have little incentive to develop new drugs against the bug that causes TB, Mycobacterium tuberculosis. Read More »

How Can Open Source Projects Support Themselves in Health Care?

High prices and poor usability hasn't driven the health care industry away from megalithic, proprietary applications. What may win the industry over to open source (in addition to the hope of fixing those two problems) is its promises of easy customization, infinite flexibility, extensibility, and seamless data exchange. As we will see, open platforms also permit organizations to collaborate on shared goals, which appeals to many participants. But if open source projects can't charge hundreds of thousands of dollars for installation as their commercial competitors do, how will they pay their developers and hold together as projects? This article compares three major organizations in the open source health care space: the tranSMART Foundation, Open Health Tools (OHT), and Open mHealth. Each has taken a different path to the universal goal of stability.

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Now We're Talking!

Will Schroeder | Kitware Blog | August 16, 2010

It's articles like the one recently published in the New York Times that so powerfully demonstrate the value of open source methods, in this case the value of data sharing and collaboration. The article "Sharing of Data Leads to Progress on Alzheimer’s" says it better than 100 blogivators ever could: Read More »

Open Source Drug Discovery

Jaqueline Hargis | Skepchick | March 8, 2012

Drug discovery is challenging, lengthy, and extraordinarily expensive. All companies focus on making money and drug companies are no different. They spend their research and development budgets focusing on diseases that affect the affluent world population. As a consequence diseases such as malaria and tuberculosis that are abundant in sub-Saharan Africa and India are left unstudied by industry. Despite the omission by drug companies, other efforts are underway to aid in drug discovery for these diseases.

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Special Report: When the Drugs Don't Work

Kate Kelland and Ben Hirschler | Reuters | March 31, 2011

Welcome to a world where the drugs don't work...for decades scientists have managed to develop new medicines to stay at least one step ahead of an ever-mutating enemy.


Now, though, we may be running out of road. MRSA alone is estimated to kill around 19,000 people every year in the United States -- far more than HIV and AIDS -- and a similar number in Europe. Other drug-resistant superbugs are spreading. Cases of often fatal "extensively drug resistant" tuberculosis have mushroomed over the past few years. A new wave of "super superbugs" with a mutation called NDM 1, which first emerged in India, has now turned up all over the world, from Britain to New Zealand.

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The Case for Transparency – AVANDIA?

Jim Murray | Open Medicine EU | February 27, 2012

In December, I argued for more transparency in relation to clinical trials, and hoped that the Commission would take up this issue in the forthcoming revision of the Clinical Trials Directive. I thought it might be useful to look at particular cases where more or earlier transparency might have saved lives or reduced harm. Read More »

Transparency Launches as Linux of Drug Development

Arlene Weintraub | Crowdsourcing.org | February 23, 2011

Then Sablinski read an article about the open-source operating system Linux and he had an epiphany. “If said, ‘If computer coders can do open source, so can drug developers,” he recalls. “You have to add patients to the mix, because they’re really the reason you’re doing drug development.”

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