Lowering Pharma firewalls: Just for Bioinformatics or Chemoinformatics also

Notion of pre-competitive collaboration has been in under experiment steadily for quite sometime now. Notable examples are the Airbus consortium of European aircraft manufacturers, the Sematech consortium of US semiconductor manufacturers, banks working together to launch Visa and Mastercard, our recent moon lust and many more. But this was never a case for pharmaceutical industry until now which is now lowering industry firewalls to shift funding and focus from early- to late-stage projects by developing cooperation in the areas with little potential for differentiation most notably a shared informatics infrastructure through public–private partnerships. Pre-competitive collaboration in this process means that everyone will have same common pool of data and resources. Competition will be still there but for better ideas, for better models and to discover first.

Pre-competitive informatics initiatives
A very interesting opinion piece appeared in September issue of Nature Reviews Drug Discovery discussing the importance of pre-competitive informatics initiatives in drug discovery. Article suggest that many companies are already beginning to embrace this idea, and that for some companies
This was a very timely review in the wake of several initiatives such a Innovative Medicines Initiative (IMI), EBI industry programme, Pistoia Alliance and many others. The idea of lowering industry firewalls caught more attention after the announcement of Sage Bionetworks, a non-profit medical research organization established this year with initiatives of Merck duo Eric Schadt and Stephen Friend. A similar kind of effortOpen Source Drug Discovery(OSDD) was launched by CSIR, India earlier this year with a initial investment of US $38 million. OSDD consortium is trying to implement open source model for Drug Discovery and public-private partnership is one of the major focus of this initiative. Exciting isn't it? But wait there is a twist in story, there are no definitive answers for what type of data is pre-competitive and what is not? The definition of of pre-competitive is fluidic and it depends on several factors, one of them is whether data belongs to biology or chemistry. Article suggests that any data and tools used by biologists should be under consideration for pre-competitive sharing but those used by chemist should remain the competitive or proprietary (which is very much according to current trends). I could not find any rational reason behind this argument except the fact that there is overwhelming amount of public data in biology domain and day by day companies and institution are finding it hard to manage, integrate and use them for drug discovery. I will go further and suggest that much of these initiatives serves no benefits unless otherwise the data and tools belonging to chemistry domain is also considered as pre-competitive. Ironically much of the data and tools released by pharmaceutical companies under these initiatives are yet to proof their importance. For instance much hyped Life Science Grid released by Eli Lilly (which went open source in year 2008) failed to attract even an average user base. Lilly released only the biology side of the grid which includes a selected group of non proprietary plug-ins, including those for Gene Browser, NCBI Entrez, and Gene Ontology. Forgive me but there are already better tools for the biology in public domain. In my opinion unhindered access to data and tool is prerequisite for the success of the pre-competitive landscape which require more active contributions from the industry participants. Currently the systems is evolving and for now something is better than nothing.
Apart from the issues related to definition of pre-competitive boundaries there are several other bottlenecks, for instance the who will fund the long-term maintainability of such an infrastructure, those remain unresolved .