Open Source Medicine/Intro

Unbelievably, it takes 10-15 years for a drug to go from development to availability. ^[1][2]. The problem of cancer, AIDS and the other killer diseases we face is not a purely scientific problem; part of the problem is the inefficient drug development 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 between biologists and biological engineers. Pink Army is an open research project dealing with developing drugs for 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.