The New York Times reports on a successful collaboration, the Alzheimer’s Disease Neuroimaging Initiative, which created a platform for sharing data on the biological markers (or biomarkers) of Alzheimer’s:
The key to the Alzheimer’s project was an agreement as ambitious as its goal: not just to raise money, not just to do research on a vast scale, but also to share all the data, making every single finding public immediately, available to anyone with a computer anywhere in the world.
There were many barriers they had to overcome to get scientists to share their data. In the end, they managed to get scientists, government agencies, pharma companies, universities and nonprofits to work together to better diagnose Alzheimer’s and measure the progression of the disease.
It’s great to see yet another example of a collaboration working in medical research.
Read the rest here.
Via Peggy Tierney’s Tweet , The Atlantic’s Megan McArdle dissects the problem of creating new treatments in our broken medical research system in the article “No Refills”. Her article goes beyond finger-pointing at the FDA or pharmaceutical companies and tackles some of the stickiest problems.
She discusses issues like internal R&D investment at pharmaceutical companies, the trend of dwindling numbers of New Molecular Entities (NMEs) issued, and the fact that the “low-hanging fruit” of drug targets for more simple diseases have been reached, leaving the more difficult and more complex diseases to treat.
McArdle ends on a hopeful note encouraging the players to break down the barriers and to find new innovations:
But the way that all these things are intertwined might actually make it easier, rather than harder, to boost our research output: any change has ripple effects. If Big Pharma can look outside its own walls more, and if the FDA can reinvent itself, the whole landscape may well alter.
Read “No Refills” here.
We’ve all heard the phrase “secrets don’t make friends.” Well, they don’t make drug treatments either. One of Forbes magazine’s blogs, The Science Business, is publishing a series of articles on how secrecy is hurting drug research. Matthew Herper, a senior editor at Forbes, authored a piece published yesterday, June 1, on the topic and it has struck a chord here at the Myelin Repair Foundation. He discusses the idea that it may be “a companies’ tendency to keep their research under wraps” that is holding them back, which is one of the reasons we use a collaborative model in our research method.
Herper also takes a moment to pinpoint some of the other locations across the country, such as the University of California, San Francisco and the headquarters of the huge drug developer, GlaxoSmithKline, that have started to share information with each other in hopes of minimizing drug development costs and maximize the number of therapies and/or cures they can find. He says “Traditionally, drug companies don’t share data with each other as studies progress. Increasingly, it seems that might be a mistake.”
If you want to read more, visit: The Science Business Blog, Forbes Magazine
There will be articles discussing the secrecy of drug research all week. Also, check out how the Myelin Repair Foundation is using the idea of research collaboration in their ARC model at MyelinRepair.org’
Crossposted at Myelin Repair Foundation Blog
