Leveraging Crowdsourcing to Facilitate the Discovery of New Medicines

Empowering the collective brain trust to perform drug discovery in an open access environment may de-risk an inherently tricky endeavor. Visions and Revisions Like the risk-averse namesake in the poem The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, the pharmaceutical industry may be poised to see “the moment of [its] greatness flicker” if it doesn’t “dare disturb the universe.” This wake-up call has spurred scientists, policy makers, foundations, and funders to devise innovative models of drug discovery. The nascent public-private partnership (PPP) Arch2POCM aims to advance drug development through the validation of pioneer therapeutic targets for human diseases in an open-access environment void of intellectual property (IP). At Arch2POCM’s recent meeting in April 2011, participants experienced a “eureka” moment—that crowdsourcing of their IP-free findings and reagents has the potential to provide clinical information about the pioneer targets in many indications and thereby mitigate some of the risk associated with therapeutics discovery and development. Here, the authors relate how Arch2POCM hopes to harness progressive minds worldwide to reinvent the drug discovery progress—and eventually transform clinical medicine. Gloomy predictions about the future of pharma have forced the industry to investigate alternative models of drug discovery. Public-private partnerships (PPPs) have the potential to revitalize the discovery and development of first-in-class therapeutics. The new PPP Arch2POCM hopes to foster biomedical innovation through precompetitive validation of pioneer therapeutic targets for human diseases. In this meeting report, we capture insights garnered from the April 2011 Arch2POCM conference.