No Competing Here

Aled Edwards, the CEO of the Structural Genomics Consortium, tells the Globe and Mail that it makes no sense for pharmaceutical scientists at different organizations to be working on the same problems. "The semiconductor industry in the '80s started to collaborate with one another on the platform," Edwards says. "They said: Every one of us generating a unique platform on which to build our hardware is silly, right? So let's pool resources, agree on the platform and innovate from there." And that is what he is promoting for pharma. "Drug discovery is making the medicine that people buy," he adds. "The stuff before what I call 'proof of concept' — why in the world are we competing over that?"