Merck releases gigantic hunk of expensive pharma data into public domain

John Wilbanks from Science Commons sez, "Merck just pledged a ton of high-resolution, very expensive data to the public domain, along with some software and other resources to make it work. It's going into a new non profit org (disclosure - I am a Board member) called Sage. This stuff isn't going to be open on day one - it takes a while to figure out how to give things like this away, and more time to make them *useful* - but it's on the road."

Sage resulted from the realization that the needs and potentials of clinical and molecular data to inform drug development are greater than the resources or capacity of any one company or institute. Sage is a legacy of successful proof of principle work accomplished at Rosetta Inpharmatics, a subsidiary of Merck & Co., Inc. in Seattle. Core human and intellectual property resources from this effort are seeding Sage’s growth. The primary output from Sage will be an open access platform available in the public domain. An incubation period of three to five years is anticipated in which new project data are generated, critical tools for building and mining disease models are developed and governing rules for sharing, accessing, and contributing to the platform are established.

Sage is a distributed research organization with nodes embedded within core academic partner facilities. Collaborating scientists from both the nonprofit and commercial sectors will contribute to projects building and using innovative new databases and tools. More detailed information will be available soon.

Sage (Thanks, John!)

• [Ian Holmes]

  CinemaJay@8: twas a jest, I don’t really think Cory is a drone (PR drone, unmanned aerial drone, indie guitar drone, honey bee drone, or any other kind of drone really).

  However you are missing the point. “It’s still newsworthy because no other pharma firm has done this yet” — done WHAT, exactly? There is NO INFORMATION ON THE WEBSITE about what the data is! Plenty of pharma companies publish papers and release data. What are you claiming is so fundamentally new about this, and more to the point, how do you know?

• [cinemajay]

  @5, I don’t think it’s worthwhile to call Cory a PR drone, it’s still newsworthy because no other pharma firm has done this yet. But, it does raise a lot of questions worthy of discussion:

  1. What’s the real value of the data
  2. Who will find it valuable
  3. What’s the quality of the data being released

  and the most important question:
  4. Why is Merck doing this now?

• [Takuan]

  “Other can also manufacture the drug, of course, but getting non exclusive rights beats having no drug to sell.

  quick! teach this to all industry!

• [zuzu]

  quick! teach this to all industry!

  Morpheus: Unfortunately, no industry can be told what Innovation is. They have to see it for themselves.

• [jahknow]

  Entering “sage” (by itself) into the [E-mail] field while replying will cause the thread not to bump to the top of the page, while still counting against its reply count. Threads that reach their reply limit can no longer be bumped, causing them to sink to the back pages and be pruned more quickly. Abusing the sage function by “sage-bombing” is frowned upon and may result in a ban.

• [Takuan]

  OK something’s up. Big Pharma being nice?
  “In February of 2009, GSK head Andrew Witty announced that the company will reduce all drug prices to 25% Western prices in the 50 least developed countries, release intellectual property rights for substances and processes relevant to neglected disease into a patent pool to encorage new drug development, and invest 20% of profits from the least developed countries in medical infrastructure for those countries.[37]. The decision has received mixed reactions from medical charities[38][39]. Doctors Without Borders welcomed the decision, encoraging other companies to follow suit, but criticised GSK for failing to include HIV patents in their patent pool, and for not including middle-income countries in the initiative[40].”

  and now Merck? Someone tell me what is really going on.

• [Takuan]

  have they scented the coming biohacker revolution and are seeking to co-opt the here-comes-everybody of medical research? Instead of fighting inevitable change, controlling it?

• [merreborn]

  Conspiracy theory:

  Merck knows this data is useless, and hopes their competition will waste their time trying to dig through it. It’s like DeBeers saying “Have all our diamond mine tailings, free!”

• [Ian Holmes]

  ummm, way to re-post a gushing press release with zero actual content about what the data really IS….

  from the publications page, there are hints that it is gene expression data, but still zero actual information. congrats, cory, you are a PR drone ;-)

• [zuzu]

  have they scented the coming biohacker revolution and are seeking to co-opt the here-comes-everybody of medical research? Instead of fighting inevitable change, controlling it?

  That’s been my hope (and side venture) for years. The same gestalt has already occurred with GMO-related businesses (e.g. Monsanto).

  c.f. Walter W. Powell and Interorganizational Collaboration and the Locus of Innovation: Networks of Learning in Biotechnology

  Hooray for DIYbio!

  The really exciting work will occur with biologics.

• [nosida]

  While a lot of this metatalk surrounding the data is interesting (what does merc gain from this?, corry is a PR drone…., are they co-opting DIY biology? etc) #11 has it right.

  There is no data on the website, nor any information about the data that could go up on the website. If it’s like any other corporate venture, particularly in an economic downturn, it’s a 2nd or 3rd tier priority on a job description which means the information is probably never going to make it from behind the bureaucratic thicket in which it is currently ensconced. The Merc legal department is going to blanch when whoever is heading the effort asks for a right to publish the context of the data- procedures, trade secrets, all the parts that allowed for creation of the data in the first place. Then they are going to blanch a second time when some bright lawyer thinks about the possibility that something in the datasets could compromise some of their legal claims or be used in a lawsuit.

  Cost benefit analysis is not in favor of this sort of initiative: too many many potential downsides no upsides besides PR. But that’s already been actualized ;-) .

• [Takuan]

  so lawyers now kill people by denying them drugs?

• [zuzu]

  Then they are going to blanch a second time when some bright lawyer thinks about the possibility that something in the datasets could compromise some of their legal claims or be used in a lawsuit.

  Normally this is the major reason why pharmaceutical companies such as Merck act stupidly. (e.g. Employees not correcting errors about drugs on Wikipedia, even from home / non-Merck IP addresses.) Everyone constantly complains about the lawyers impeding innovation.

  But…

  If it’s like any other corporate venture, particularly in an economic downturn, it’s a 2nd or 3rd tier priority on a job description which means the information is probably never going to make it from behind the bureaucratic thicket in which it is currently ensconced.

  Actually, with their drug development pipeline practically exhausted (at least for “blockbusters”), and all of their current blockbusters going off-patent, and after the Vioxx scandal (even though Merck was being more honest than the FDA was willing to be — which made the FDA look bad; and even though Pfizer still sells Celebrex), Merck is currently in a subdued panic internally right now. So, to answer the question:

  Why is Merck doing this now?

  The answer seems to be: desperation

  It’s a “hail mary” gambit, like the Palm Pre.

• [GuidoDavid]

  Takuan is mostly right.
  The amount of data in these databases is huge, lots of high throughput experiments that require massive analytical power, not only computers, but also trained people. And Big Pharma realized that there is a gold mine of analytical power outside, crowdsourcing works for everybody, also for them.

  If they release the data and tomorrow a young grad student from Andorra discovers something interesting, a correlation that makes a drug feasible, the data is free and will be used by Merck to manufacture the drug. Other can also manufacture the drug, of course, but getting non exclusive rights beats having no drug to sell.

  Novartis already did this>
  http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v431/n7012/full/4311029b.html

  Besides, it gives good PR to the company and keeps people like me happy.