Big Pharmas back open source drug discovery with money and molecules

Call it crowdsourcing for cures. Fed up with outdated models for finding new treatments that have missed the mark, drugmakers and other public health stakeholders have ignited open source efforts that involve networks of companies and scientists joining forces to discover drugs. And one of the pioneering efforts of this ilk in India is moving ahead with a mid-stage trial for a drug against tuberculosis.

India's Open Source Drug Discovery unit, which uses an online infrastructure to connect more than 5,500 scientists and others, revealed late last month with the Global Alliance on TB that the anti-tuberculosis molecule will be investigated in a Phase IIb trial in India, Forbes reported. And the open source group has two more TB molecules in advanced preclinical testing that could eventually enter trials and combat the infectious disease, which kills about 400,000 people annually in India.


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Roche helps corral diabetes chitchat from Twitter

Swiss drug giant Roche ($RHHBY) is famous for its targeted approach to attacking diseases with drugs. Now part of its Twitter strategy appears to be zeroing in on the diabetes community, with the recent launch of a page on the social networking site called Diabetes Nest.

The site, sponsored by Roche Diabetes Care and created by Ignite Health, funnels in Twitter comments from a handpicked group of diabetes commentators. The site's so-called "caretakers," who help curate the content on the Twitter page, are pocketing money for their efforts. InPharm is among the outlets that pointed out the potential conflicts of interest here. Basically, this is pharma-sponsored site that pays people to help carry messages to a target audience.

One paid hand, Gina Capone, who founded TheDiabetesResource.com and DiabetesTalkfest.com, stated: "If you want to find out what people touched by diabetes are talking about, the best place to find it is at the Diabetes Nest. Thought leaders, parents, healthcare professionals all in one place communicating with each other—it really is a no brainer."


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NIH grabs share of Obama's $200M big data bet,

http://www.fiercebiotechit.com/story/nih-grabs-share-obamas-new-200m-bet-big-data/2012-04-02?utm_medium=nl&utm_source=internal

By Ryan McBride

Big data has won a $200 million endorsement from the White House, and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) stands to gain a sizable share of funding. The NIH revealed March 29 that it is one of 6 federal agencies in line to reap benefits from the initiative to find solutions for taming huge datasets.
The NIH and National Science Foundation have teamed up to award up to $25 million from the initiative for 15 to 20 projects in science and engineering fields. In the biomedical arena, for instance, the NIH wants to fund projects that could enable the crunching of massive amounts of data to aid scientific investigations. Also, the agency announced that digital data from the international 1000 Genomes Project will be hosted in the cloud by Amazon Web Services and be available for free.
President Obama's big data bet follows criticism from the scientific community that, despite the billions of dollars invested in genomic research and molecular biology studies, a relative pittance has gone into supporting the gigantic datasets that have resulted from those efforts. For example, cheap and fast DNA sequencing has motivated federally funded labs to explore sequencing, yet few of them have the internal computing power to manage and analyze the massive genomic datasets.

How massive? The 1000 Genomes Project eats up 200 terabytes of storage, equal to some 16 million filing cabinets stuffed with text or 30,000 DVDs, according to the NIH.

"Improving access to data from this important project will accelerate the ability of researchers to understand human genetic variation and its contribution to health and disease," stated Dr. Eric Green, director of the NIH's National Human Genome Research Institute, which is one of the backers of the 1000 Genomes Project.

- here's the NIH's release
- check out InformationWeek's article