Reaching Out to Collaborators: Crowdsourcing for Pharmaceutical Research

Abstract

Doing more with less resources used to be a situation common just for academic scientists. This is unfortunately still true for academics, but we are seeing others facing many of the same challenges. With the squeeze on budgets and cost-cutting resulting from recent worldwide economic challenges, the failure of many drugs to make it through the pipeline to the market, and the increasing costs associated with the drug development process, we are now seeing in the pharmaceutical industry a dramatic shift, perhaps belatedly, to have to accommodate similar challenges of doing more with less. This situation could also represent the further crumbling of a 150year-old-plus paradigm of the large company being the predominant source for developing therapeutics for profit. We are also seeing increased discussion about different models of facilitating pharmaceutical research as well as the suggestion of opportunities to collaborate and use tools that perhaps would not have been considered in the past (1–4). This shift to “openness” in certain areas, specifically the sharing of precompetitive data and processes, parallels the societal shifts we have seen in so many areas of open-source software development, the sharing of data, and the utility of free data resources and repositories, such as PubChem (http://pubchem.ncbi.nlm. nih.gov/) and others (see Table I). From the extreme of keeping entire projects in house, there is a shift to decentralized research. One view of pharmaceutical research is to use loose networks of external researchers from companies, academics or consultants, create a community around a shared interest and gather their ideas. We think this comes closest to the ideal of crowdsourcing where the wisdom of the many and their varied perspectives can benefit community-based efforts whether in software, knowledge capture, etc. The loose definition of crowdsourcing as “outsourcing a task to a group or community of people in an open call” is a relatively new phenomenon, culture or movement, which is best summarized in the book “Wikinomics, How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything” (5). Living in our connected world, pharmaceutical researchers can communicate in a variety of ways (4) to leverage ideas from around the globe. These ideas do not have to come from within the walls of a single organisation. Taking this further: why limit access to just ideas? Open tools and data could feed an ecosystem. They could also breed a new class of researcher without affiliation, who has allegiance to neither company nor research organization. They test their hypotheses with data from elsewhere, they do their experiments through a network of collaborations, they may have no physical lab; while a shared cause may not be essential, confidentiality agreements and software may unite them as a loose cooperative. Such approaches may become more commonplace, like the Open Innovation efforts represented by companies such as NineSigma (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ninesigma) and Innocentive (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Innocentive). The One Billion Minds approach for open innovation (http://www.onebillion minds.com/) has already been mapped into the Life Sciences, where a million minds in the community have been called to participate in community annotation in Wikiproteins (http:// genomebiology.com/2008/9/5/R89). A recent example of the power of crowdsourcing is the availability of freely accessible online resources to enable and support drug discovery. For instance, online databases, including PubChem, Chemical Entities of Biological Interest or ChEBI database (http://www.ebi.ac.uk/chebi/), DrugBank (http://www.drugbank.ca/), the Human Metabolome Database (www.hmdb.ca) and ChemSpider (http://www.chem spider.com/) represent good examples (6–8) in addition to commercial databases (9) and collaborative systems like CDD (http://www.collaborativedrug.com). These represent either government or privately funded initiatives with vastly differing resources and scopes. Chemistry (and with it biology) information on the internet has thus become more accessible just as we are seeing a massive increase in screening data coming from individual laboratories. Sometimes there are synergistic benefits of crowdsourcing; for example, the efforts behind the ChemSpider platform, originally a hobby project housed from a basement and recently acquired by the Royal 1 Collaborations in Chemistry, 601 Runnymede Avenue, Jenkintown, Pennsylvania 19046, USA. 2 Collaborative Drug Discovery, 1633 Bayshore Highway, Suite 342, Burlingame, California 94403, USA. Department of Pharmaceutical Sciences, University of Maryland, College Park, Maryland 21201, USA. 4 Department of Pharmacology, Robert Wood Johnson Medical School, University of Medicine & Dentistry of New Jersey (UMDNJ), 675 Hoes lane, Piscataway, New Jersey 08854, USA. 5 Royal Society of Chemistry, 904 Tamaras Circle, Wake Forest, North Carolina 27587, USA. 6 To whom correspondence should be addressed. (e-mail: ekinssean @yahoo.com) Pharmaceutical Research, Vol. 27, No. 3, March 2010 (# 2010) DOI: 10.1007/s11095-010-0059-0