Where is Open Source Breast Cancer?

jenrio

The way normal pharmaceutical development is done, you fidn an interesting compound that might work, you keep it under the top secrecy wraps, make sure you check all related compounds for the best efficacy and then you take out patents  (usually years later from the discovery of compound), then you run clinical trials, which takes more years (10 years) till approval.   Along the way, you discourage competitors from investigating this compound or obvious alternatives threatening them with patent violations, you take a lot of risk because your compound may not work.   In the end, ideally if the drug works great, you charge patients lots of money for it and become rich.   If it works somewhat, you take a long time to tweak it to work or even never succeed.  If it doesn't work, you wasted a lot of money/time and need to charge more money for other successful drugs to stay in business.

A small lab in Boston developed an interesting compound that MAY work magic against certain rare cancers.   So they did something completely different.  They published their early prototype and encouraged other labs/pharmaceutical companies to work on it.    What normally took years now ended taking less than a year.

It's the pharmaceutical equivalent of "Open source development" in computer science, which gave us Linux, Apache, Java and Android and Firefox, each of them heavyweight in their own markets, the results of thousands of amateur coders contributing their spare time. 

Watch this video.   And if you are looking for place to donate your money, consider donating to Jay Bradner's lab and ask how to start an open source development project for breast cancer research: 

http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/en/jay_bradner_open_source_cancer_research.html