ScienceOpen, the research and Open Access publishing network are delighted to announce that, together with partners The Global Health Next Generation Network (GHNGN) – a multidisciplinary group that strengthens the voice of students and young professionals in this field and encourages them to share scientific knowledge, today we have published a new Global Health article collection.
The objective of this Collection, is to encourage discussion on different topics in this field such as female genital mutilation, primary care in developing states and Epidemiology in Latin America and the Carribean. We want to encourage the global health community to start an interactive conversation around this original and previously published research by participating in Post-Publication Peer Review (PPPR) which is a key part of the ScienceOpen service. Here’s a short video that explains how.
We have a meme and hashtags “#review4GH” and “#ScienceOpen4GH” to encourage others to participate in the online dialogue. The topics covered are complex and difficult but as a group that represents the future leaders of tomorrow’s global health world, the GHNGN are using social media to encourage their membership and beyond, to take part.
The publication of this Collection is timely given their imminent 2nd International Conference in Barcelona on June 25th. They will be sharing their experiences of working with ScienceOpen on this Collection with those attending and encouraging them to add their articles to it so the Collection continues to live and grow. 
The reason that they chose to forge a closer relationship with ScienceOpen is because of our active support of Earlier Career Researchers and the fact that we conveniently combine 3 services on one platform namely:
- Gold Open Access (OA) publishing – articles that are freely available to read and re-use
- Non-Anonymous Post-Publication Peer Review – for the most transparent feedback
- OA content aggregation – making it easier to browse and re-use the literature, regardless of publisher
For further information on this Collection please email Joceline Kranenburg, Partnership coordinator, GHNGN.
Every year in May, I attend the Charité Entrepreneurship Summit, a unique event for international medical entrepreneurs and life science innovators organized by the Charité Foundation in Berlin. This ‘think-tank’ meeting connects sparkling ideas with pragmatic reality and facilitates a ‘one-of-a-kind’ scene for ‘let’s innovate and implement’ biomedical professionals and entrepreneurs from all over the world. This year, I had a special opportunity to meet and conduct an interview with Dr. Anula Jayasuriya, a wonderful personality and a talented scientist, physician, and investor. While contacting and talking with Anula Jayasuriya, I realized that she represents an amazing role model for every young scientist-entrepreneur. Here is some of food for thought from our conversation on entrepreneurship in medical sciences and open science.
Q1: The NIH has been one of the biggest forces behind the push towards increasing access to scientific information, but we are just at the beginning of the open science movement – open data being the next big hurdle. Do you see potential for an impact on the US health care system?
AJ: I think the NIH initiatives are very exciting, and open data will make a huge difference in the whole US health care system – but it will take time. At the end of the day, the NIH doesn’t make drugs, right? So we have to contend with industry. I wonder how it’s going to play out for pharma and biotech? Their business model is centered on protecting their innovations with IP and making money from products during the exclusivity period.
The moral imperative to share drug development data is that such information would greatly benefit patients and society. Let’s speculate that three big pharma companies working on development of the same category of drugs in their pipelines would be willing to share their failure results. This would be very important in preventing adverse reactions and health-related complications in patients. Perhaps these companies could form an industry consortium where every company was required to share their drug development failure data. There are many hurdles to be overcome before this can be a reality. For example, the first to fail is likely to benefit others but not itself. Money saved by averting future failures maybe eclipsed by lost revenues and compromised IP, etc. Pharma has to see an economic incentive to share data. Perhaps there could be an attractive market for acquiring failure information? In any case, there would need to be a dramatic transformation and innovation around the existing IP-based “winner-take-all” industry business model.
Pharma has to see an economic incentive to share data
Q2: Do you believe that patient access to the clinical trial data and mandated data sharing will create a climate that could accelerate drug development and translational science research?
AJ: I believe that the biggest motivator and catalyst in this process of sharing clinical trial information will be the patient. We are entering a very exciting era of patient engagement. Going forward, I see patients playing active roles in clinical trials. As patient participation is essential to clinical drug development patients have the power to make the change. The passive patient is likely to become a memory of the past. Already today there is a US Government funded institute called PCORI (Patient Centered Outcomes Research Institute) that is making grants to investigators who engage patients in clinical trial design. I see patients challenging Pharma, Biotech and Regulators to adapt to a world where patients are active decision makers alongside industry and regulators. The FDA today is caught in the middle of a rapidly transforming ethos. All stakeholders will need to adapt to a new equilibrium. Let me give you some examples. In 1993, I was working for Roche pharmaceuticals. This was during the early days of the HIV outbreak where there was an urgent need to develop new drugs to fight the devastating epidemic. Patient advocacy groups had a huge impact on getting pharma companies to work together and also influenced the FDA to act quickly and really make a difference (read more about Act Up). I saw first-hand how powerful the cooperative approach was. By the way, physicians were very pleased to see collaborations, which led to effective treatment and greatly benefited patients. But that was one narrow case in the past.
Today, I see changes taking place across several diseases, especially in fighting cancer and rare diseases. Patients, together with their families, are building tight communities to share and disseminate knowledge about their diseases. In the USA, there is a popular movement called “hacking your body”. This is a different kind of open innovation – the innovations are ones that have been “opened”/discovered by patients. The drive is coming from patients and their families. Now, patients are playing active roles, often going around regulatory barriers and industry specifications and advocating for themselves. As a physician, I am immensely pleased to see engaged patients. There are likely to be some hiccups and missteps along the way but I think that in the long run it will lead to accelerated drug development and, most importantly, better patient outcomes.
I believe that the biggest motivator and catalyst in this process of sharing clinical trial information will be the patient… This is a different kind of open innovation – the innovations are ones that have been “opened”/discovered by patients.
In the US, patients are entitled to free access to their medical records. If patients who participated in clinical trials were also entitled to access to their clinical trial records and were able to communicate with co-participants in the same trial I think they could “hack” the trial, by comparing adverse events and outcomes. And they are likely to share these aggregated data openly even if industry does not. I see patients, their families and society as the key actors in improving their health care.
There are two important ways to improve and accelerate drug development: understanding the science behind drug failures, and developing a process of sharing information openly within trial participant and disease the communities through the internet.
It is very encouraging that the NCI (the National Cancer Institute (NCI), part of the US National Institutes of Health) has successfully mediated a unique public-private partnership called the lung map trial, a multi-pharma collaboration in lung cancer. Five pharmaceutical companies (Amgen, Genentech, Pfizer, AstraZeneca, and AstraZeneca’s global biologics R&D arm, MedImmune) and Foundation Medicine (a cancer tumor genome analytics company) will collaborate to provide the treatment that is best suited to the individual patient – delivering personalized care. Patients need to enroll only in a single trial to access drugs developed by five different pharma companies. This is a groundbreaking development – real progress.
In addition, there are many digital health start-up companies whose business models are based on selling anonymized clinical trial data. (Of course, there are several ethical, privacy and compliance considerations to be addressed, but let’s just put them aside for now.) The promise of “Big Data Analytics” as it applies to health care is that the aggregation of these data will lead to better outcome for patients. I am optimistic!
There are two important ways to improve and accelerate drug development: understanding the science behind drug failures, and developing a process of sharing information openly within trial participant and disease the communities through the internet.
(Read more here: Big data analytics in healthcare: promise and potential; Making Big Data Work: The Promise and Potential to …)
Q3: Do you think that big data, open science, and a worldwide network could in the future precisely tailor therapies to each patient’s individual requirement?
AJ: Precision medicine is the holy grail of health care. Tailoring cancer therapies makes a big difference in treatment outcomes today – cancer is the “low hanging fruit” due to easy access to the genomic analyses of tumors. Ultimately, delivering precision medicine relies on aggregating and analyzing data on a large number of areas: genomics, metabolomics, RNA, proteomics, behavior, environmental exposures, social and cultural milieus, etc. – this is a VERY big data play. I think the delivery of precision medicine will happen incrementally, in stages – with ever increasing degrees of precision as our understanding of the various contributing areas increase. Open science and data sharing are essential to generating the best data inputs from a multitude of sources to create a big data repository that serves as the basis for analytics.
Open innovation enables us to create products from a platform (repository) of information, which is freely available to everybody. For instance, having unrestricted access to scientific literature enables a company to develop their own algorithms for novel prognostic and diagnostic genomic screens – they could, for example, figure out which patients are sensitive/resistant to various drugs. Algorithms “learn” — the more patient data tested, the more an algorithm is refined and hence clinically informative. If, however, a company develops a screening or diagnostic test and patents it, thus excluding its use by others, it is no longer “open”.
The case of Myriad Genetics Inc. is interesting. They recently lost a lawsuit contesting the exclusivity of their BRCA test for breast cancer. The company used patient sequence information to develop and patent their screening test. Myriad claimed that they had exclusive rights to patients’ sequence information and to the test they derived from it. For several years Myriad was able to build a very profitable business by excluding others from duplicating their test, even though the actual sequence information the company used belonged to patients (http://www.the-scientist.com/?articles.view/articleNo/36076/title/Gene-Patents-Decision–Everybody-Wins/). Myriad’s claims were overturned and patent law is the US changed such that naturally occurring sequences can no longer be patented. I am in favor of this outcome as it greatly benefits patients who can now access BRACA tests from several companies at a much lower price.
I am excited about the concept of open innovation because it is a major step toward improving patient care. That being said, in a capitalist society, this has to be tempered by providing sufficient incentives to industry (on whom we are dependent unless we innovate a new model) to produce drugs, diagnostics, etc. I am confident that the “new normal” will result in better health care for society and the ability of industry to adapt and innovate novel and more productive business models.
I thank Dr. Anula Jayasuriya for the fascinating insights into the world of drug discovery and the role open innovation can play.
