It is impossible to ignore the impact of social media in recent years and its powerful ability to connect people, ideas, and information across time and space. For relatively minimal time and effort, commercial websites can be created with tremendous social value (e.g. use of social media in Egypt's youth revolution). Contrast this to the aging drug development industry, which many pundits claim is facing a crisis due to a “broken business model”. Cash burn is too high, development timelines too long, approvals too infrequent, and reimbursement too low. Perhaps this is true, but pharmaceuticals are far too important to humanity for the industry to simply dissolve. Inevitably some set of phenomena will cause a rapid and dramatic change in the BioPharma ecosystem - a punctuated equilibrium of sorts. Could social media be this meteor? Could the IT world ironically give BioPharma the dose of medicine it so desperately needs?
The striking aspect of the social media site Twitter is its openness and ability to index and communicate massive amounts of information. Similar to the invisible hand of capitalism, Twitter’s collective platform has a greater power than the sum of its individual contributors. In contrast, the BioPharma industry operates mainly in shadows and silos. At the research level, the patent system, while necessary to compensate investors for taking large and lengthy risks, clearly can stymy communication and the public’s ability to freely innovate in already staked areas. At the patient level, confidentiality and the historical difficulty of obtaining and sharing consistent digitalized clinical data are barriers to identifying large-scale trends through applying population statistics. When these barriers are overcome, the subsequent increase in the efficiency and effectiveness of drug discovery could return the industry to its boom years.
Signs of the social media meteor can already be seen. Sage Bionetworks, a nonprofit research organization, is trying to “create an open access, integrative bionetwork evolved by contributor scientists working to eliminate human disease (http://sagebase.org/sage/index.php)”. According to their website, “The Sage Commons . . . an accessible information platform . . . will be used to integrate diverse molecular mega-datasets, to build predictive bionetworks and to offer advanced tools proven to provide unique new insights into human disease biology. Users will also be contributors that advance the knowledge base and tools through their cumulative participation. The public access goal of the Sage Commons requires the development of a new strategic and legal framework to protect the rights of contributors while providing widespread access to fundamentally non-commercial assets (http://sagebase.org/commons/index.php).”“Open-Source” sharing of discoveries seems anti-capitalistic. Patents should certainly continue to exist for downstream commercial developments that require millions of dollars of investment. However, many academic, corporate, and clinical datasets and scientific results will never be relevant for commercialization. A lot of information is sitting stale in a lot of labs and doctor’s offices across the globe. Like individual pieces of a large jigsaw puzzle, a clear picture of human biology only emerges when they are combined. BioPharma stakeholders will have to adjust to freely sharing basic research, datasets, and perhaps bioinformatics tools. In return, the resulting improvement in the fundamental understanding of biology will dramatically improve the success rates of patented drugs and lower costs of development. Although there will be a lot of cultural resistance at first, the social media meteor may be just what it takes to keep the struggling BioPharma ecosystem alive.
Relevant Links:
http://www.economist.com/node/2724420?story_id=2724420
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