Open Innovation News
Two fascinating stories about open innovation caught our attention this week.
The first concerns two global drugs companies sharing their chemical compound libraries to speed up drug discovery, while the second is the launch of a European open data platform.
The pharma giants AstraZeneca and Sanofi are going to share 210,000 chemical compounds each from their hitherto secretive respective proprietary compound libraries. The hope is that this will lead to new treatments for disease and new drugs coming to market quicker.
This big open innovation exchange of pharma information will allow both entities to increase the chemical diversity of their collections and screen a more diverse range of potentially useful material.
Each company can investigate the compounds – the building blocks of new drug development – without restrictions on diseases area. This is believed to be the first time that such an exchange has happened for free.
“We did talk to other people,” said a spokesman for AstraZeneca. “But they all wanted financial regulations, such as downstream royalties.”
Each company will retain individual rights to develop any drugs that result from the exchange.
Huge Data Project
The brand new European Data Portal harvests meta data from over 240,000 open data sets in Europe that have been released by public sector authorities. Individuals and companies will now have a one-stop shop where they can find public data sets from across the European continent.
Much of this material has been available to non-governmental organisations, but up until now there hasn’t been a single place to search for and absorb such a wide range of data. The information can form part of new apps and products and be used to gain insights into numerous areas such as traffic congestion and crime rates.
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