In today's post, I'd like to discuss
the idea of open-source/crowd-source researches, and optimistically
suggest/promote the adoption of this philosophy in future researches.
In many fields of study, we've seen the concept of open source and
crowdsourcing adopted and successfully achieving great development
and solutions to seemingly unsolvable problems. In the computer
science industry, we've seen major successes in the development of
computer software, where applications such as OpenOffice, GIMP (More
of these on the previous post) help reduce fees to use/modify these
applications, and drive development of software forward. Other
examples include Apache (http://httpd.apache.org/)
and Linux operating systems (https://www.linux.com/).
In light of these successes, it has
been suggested in the field of medicine to adopt the idea of
open-source reseach and crowdsourcing. In particular, I'd like to
address the issues of current (and past) cancer researches:
Personally, I believe that this
reporter has blown this out of proportion, but there are some key
issues that are true here: The profits are little to none since in
most jurisdictions, chemical patents are hard to protect. It was also
mentioned that Dr. Evangelos Michelakis had a “hard time getting
anybody to pay attention to this because there's no money to be made
in this,” but then he mentioned the possibility of insurance
companies to invest in this promising research, and the response was
that there are many walls that make it hard for insurance companies
to invest in these researches.
The general issues in cancer researches
are lack of profit and no support, which brings the following
question:
Is There Really a Conspiracy to
Suppress Cancer Cures?
Here is Jay Bradner's view on making
cancer researches open source:
(This video is both in YouTube and in Ted Talks)
Jay Bradner is a researcher in Harvard and Dana Farber, and he talks about his progress in cancer research. In his speech, he mentioned that a drug company would probably "keep this a secret until they turn the prototype drug into an active pharmaceutical substance," and they just did the opposite. They published a paper describing their findings explaining how to make the chemical compound that they've made. It ultimately made the perfect competitive environment. The openness of this cancer research is it's greatest strength, and I believe that with more specialists brought into this research, we can speed the progress of making better cancer treatment and discovering more cancer cures.
Jay Bradner is basically giving the "secret" away for the better of progress in curing cancer. With so many labs and pharmaceutical companies in the world we can surely agree that this is the perfect environment for open source cancer researches. I believe that there is great potential in this philosophy, and making the cancer research open source will ultimately help subvert cancer.
