Medicines Lliures [open-source]

El moviment del programari lliure es va estentnt. Ja vaig comentar un dia la cervesa llliure (open-source beer), i ara són les medicines lliures (open-source pharmaceuticals, gràcies, Slashdot!).

S’ha creat una empresa anomenada Sage a partir d’un investigador de Merck, que pretèn recopilar dades i proporcionar-les lliurement perquè els investigadors puguin desenvolupar noves medicines i fàrmacs. Em sembla una innovació, i a més segurament pot permetre una millor recerca:

Vision: Create an open access, integrative bionetwork evolved by contributor scientists working to eliminate human disease.

Sage is a new, not-for-profit medical research organization established in 2009 to revolutionize how researchers approach the complexity of human biological information and the treatment of disease. Sage’s objectives are:

• to build and support an open access platform and databases for building innovative new dynamic disease models
• to interconnect scientists as contributors to evolving, integrated networks of biological data

Background

Sage resulted from the realization that the needs and potentials of clinical and molecular data to inform drug development are greater than the resources or capacity of any one company or institute. Sage is a legacy of successful proof of principle work accomplished at Rosetta Inpharmatics, a subsidiary of Merck & Co., Inc. in Seattle. Core human and intellectual property resources from this effort are seeding Sage’s growth. The primary output from Sage will be an open access platform available in the public domain. An incubation period of three to five years is anticipated in which new project data are generated, critical tools for building and mining disease models are developed and governing rules for sharing, accessing, and contributing to the platform are established.

Sage is a distributed research organization with nodes embedded within core academic partner facilities. Collaborating scientists from both the nonprofit and commercial sectors will contribute to projects building and using innovative new databases and tools. More detailed information will be available soon.