We can all
see that oil companies would not be overly interested in developing a new
technology that eliminates the need for oil, but we persist in believing that
drug companies are interested in curing cancer, heart disease and diabetes.
Sorry to say, but it just ain't so. Drug companies are primarily interested in producing profit through the sale of drugs. Some drugs are more profitable than others. To most of us, the perfect medical treatment is a one-time, low cost
treatment that permanently cures an illness. To a drug company executive, the
perfect medical treatment is a long-term maintenance drug, required by millions of people
and exclusively controlled by the drug company through a patent. So, we have
drugs like Lipitor that when taken for a lifetime, at a relatively high price per dose, will only slow the inevitable progress of arterial disease. We have drugs like Taxol that, at great expense,
slow the growth and spread of cancer for some people for a limited period of time. The business model that drives our health care system is very good a producing expensive, high profit medications. Unfortunately, that system works against the development of treatments that actually cure illness. In contrast to this traditional approach, the Open Source Medicine Foundation seeks no profit and focuses its research efforts on those areas neglected by traditional drug companies because they are unlikely to produce large profits. Our focus is on curing illness. Our first research project--the Free HDL project--has as its objective the production of HDL cholesterol for the treatment of arterial diseases. HDL cholesterol is is a naturally occuring protein that is not readily patentable. Drug companies won't spend money developing HDL as a product because it would be difficult to prevent others from duplicating an HDL treatment and selling it. That is why drug
companies ignore basic HDL research while spending billions to develop new
daily maintenance drugs designed to alter the bodies production of cholesterol. The result is a very lucrative stream of products that produce medical results of very limited value. The purpose of the Open Source Medicine Foundation is not to suggest
that there is some grand conspiracy among drug companies to avoid finding
cures, but simply to point out that it is often not in their best interest to do so.
We should never have expected drug companies to seek out solutions that would
destroy their profits. It is time for us to wake up. There is a solution to this problem. If
you're interested, stay tuned and keep reading. We need your help!
An
open-source shot in the arm
The Economist
The open-source
model is a good way to produce software, as the example of Linux shows. Could
the same collaborative approach now revitalize medical research too? Can
goodwill, aggregated over the internet, produce good medicine? The current
approach to drug discovery works up to a point, but it is far from perfect. It
is costly to develop medicines and get regulatory approval. The patent system
can foreclose new uses or enhancements by outside researchers. And there has to
be a consumer willing (or able) to pay for the resulting drugs, in order to
justify the cost of drug development. Pharmaceutical companies have little
incentive to develop treatments for diseases that particularly afflict the poor,
for example, since the people who need such treatments most may not be able to
afford them.
It is in this
environment that a number of medical biologists, lawyers, entrepreneurs and
health-care activists have sought improvements. They have suggested borrowing
the "open-source" approach that has proven so successful in another
area of technology, namely software development. This is a decentralized form
of production in which the underlying programming instructions, or "source
code", for a given piece of software are made freely available. Anyone can
look at it, modify it, or improve it, provided they agree to share their
modifications under the same terms. Volunteers collaborating in this way over
the internet have produced some impressive software: the best-known example is
the Linux operating system. So why not apply the open-source model to drug
development too?
In fact,
open-source approaches have emerged in biotechnology already. The international
effort to sequence the human genome, for instance, resembled an open-source
initiative. It placed all the resulting data into the public domain rather than
allow any participant to patent any of the results. Open source is also
flourishing in bioinformatics, the field in which biology meets information
technology. This involves performing biological research using supercomputers
rather than test-tubes. Within the bioinformatics community, software code and
databases are often swapped on "you share, I share" terms, for the
greater good of all. Evidently the open-source approach works in
biological-research tools and pre-competitive platform technologies. The
question now is whether it will work further downstream, closer to the patient,
where the development costs are greater and the potential benefits more direct.
Open-source
research could indeed, it seems, open up two areas in particular. The first is
that of non-patentable compounds and drugs whose patents have expired. These
receive very little attention from researchers, because there would be no way
to protect (and so profit from) any discovery that was made about their
effectiveness. To give an oft-quoted example, if aspirin cured cancer, no
company would bother to do the trials to prove it, or go through the rigmarole
of regulatory approval, since it could not patent the discovery. (In fact, it
might be possible to apply for a process patent that covers a new method of
treatment, but the broader point still stands.) Lots of potentially useful
drugs could be sitting under researchers' noses. Read the rest of this article
from THE ECONOMIST reprinted in full at CPTech.org.
A
new publication called Open Medicine was recently created to provide a forum for the
uncensored, unobstructed publication and sharing of medical information without
the undue influence of drug company money. We suggest you read this
excellent article about how Open
Medicine came into existence and then visit Open Medicine directly to see what you
think. Another similar publication, PLoS
Medicine is produced by the Public
Libarary of Science (PLoS). Both of these scholarly journals are of high
quality and they are doing for medical publishing what the Foundation hopes to
do for medical research. Please lend them your support.