Logo

No Competing Here

Feb 25, 2012

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?"

Breaking News
The Scan

mRNA-Based Vaccine on the Way in China

China may soon have its own mRNA-based vaccine, according to Nature News.

Arranged Killing, Fraud Alleged by Prosecutors

The Wall Street Journal reports that prosecutors allege that the co-founder of a biotech arranged to have a business associate who threatened to expose him as a fraud killed.

Whirlwind Decade of CRISPR

The New York Times looks back at the 10 years since the University of California, Berkeley's Jennifer Doudna and her colleagues published their CRISPR paper.

PNAS Papers on Blue Cone Monochromacy Structural Variants, HIV-1 Mutant, T-ALL

In PNAS this week: structural variants linked to blue cone monochromacy, HIV-1 variants affecting the matrix protein p17, and more.