Difference between revisions of "Open Source Medicine/Open collaborative medicine"
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Revision as of 16:56, 20 May 2010
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Unbelievably, it takes 10-15 years for a scientific discovery to result in improved patient care [1][2] (some authorities even say 20 years [3]). In other words, now in 2010, patients receive the best medical technology 1995 has to offer. This is simply not good enough, especially in this era of biochemical revolution and rapidly accelerating scientific discovery. It is imperative that society develop a quicker pipeline between scientific discovery and clinical care, to allow sick people to benefit from the recent advances in medical science. Open source medicine is this pipeline.
Drugs are now developed by competing corporations who carefully guard their research from public eyes, lest their methods be copied and they miss out the opportunity to profit financially from it. There is an alternative medical research methodology, one that is open rather than secretive, collaborative rather than competitive, and done with the aim of solving the problem at hand, rather than profiting from it. Open WetWare is a massive hub of open collaboration among biologists and biological engineers. Pink Army is a co-operative, patient-controlled organization that develops individualized drugs for treating breast cancer. The Open Source Drug Discovery Network is a large collaborative project that successfully mapped the genome of tuberculosis.
Open medical research brings the potential of high-quality development of drugs for treating the 'neglected diseases'. These are diseases that occur exclusively among poor communities and go unresearched by pharmaceutical companies because it is not feasible financially to develop drugs for people who can't afford them.
