Can open science help patients and save pharma?

"contrary to what you might expect, research has gotten less efficient over the last 60 years, despite innovations in clinical research: the number of drugs approved annually has remained relatively static, while the financial resources required for R&D have soared at a rate well beyond inflation." This right here is nonsense. The fact is that 60 years ago biochemistry was a new and exciting field where you could grow a weird mold and discover the cure for diseases that have plagued mankind since we came down from the trees. All of the obvious chemical reactions have been discovered and the age of new miracles every day coming from garage labs is long gone.

Just because this is the case doesn't mean that research has become 'less efficient.' Modern research methods are vastly more efficient than they were in the 50s, but unfortunately research is also much harder than it used to be.

Open source doesn't make things more efficient, it makes things more robust due to redundancy and transparency. This is something that can help science but don't expect miracles.

the quotes that seem to imply "room for improvement" actually do nothing of the kind. from the article: ---- The clinical side of it keeps getting longer. Well, not so much longer, but costlier and with poorer success rates. That is a big concern. (a senior academician)

R&D is very slow" and the" costs are ungodly. (a Vice President at a large pharma company)

It’s terrible because it is so costly and [pharma has] such poor success rates – the predictability of their models is so bad. (a senior regulator of the FDA) ----

These people are not complaining about the fact that pharmaceutical companies are keeping secrets and are inefficient, they're complaining about how inventing a new drug costs about as much as the GDP of a small country. And one of their major objections to open science is that it will bring together a bunch of companies that actually lower efficiency, and then their profits will go down because they reveal trade secrets. So you could end up with lower efficiency and lowered motivation to invest in research since the costs don't go down and the risks have gone up.

I'm not saying I'm against a less evil Big Pharma, but I'm not convinced that it's gonna lower costs or increase the rate of discovery.

The transparency can help to reduce costs, as things like negative results are shared, along with some of the infrastructure each company is building independently that isn't particularly exciting and could be shared without losing their competitive edge. Why should each company invest in their own data processing, visualization, search and modeling packages when much of that is not overly unique? Why not build a common base, and then customize the pieces that make sense? Sharing of clinical trial data, rather than repeating similar clinical trials? These are opportunities, but they certainly are not without risk. RDKit is one great example of an open-source toolkit developed primarily at a large pharma company for example.

One can see how Big Pharma will go the way of Big Music - just not in this decade.

Yes, it is a more efficient way of doing science.