COLLABORATIONS IN CHEMISTRY - Collaborative Computational Technologies for Biomedical Research - page 90

the 90 - 10 - 1 rule holds ( http://www.90 - 9 - 1.com/ ); only 10% of the visitors will
edit or comment and only 1% of the visitors will contribute new content. The
same is likely true of collaborative chemistry resources on the Internet.

5.2.1 Crowdsourcing Platforms

A number of platforms enabling collaborative contributions to chemistry are
already available. Certainly Wikipedia is one of these platforms and many
thousands of encyclopedic articles regarding chemical compounds, materials,
and synthetic reactions have been compiled by contributors. There is concen-
trated effort—a Wiki Project—to curate and correct chemistry information on
Wikipedia ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia%3ACHEMISTRY ). In
addition to chemical information, there are contributions from biologists and
medical experts to add details about diseases, genes, and proteins, and this has
already created an incredibly rich resource of information.
Other examples related to chemistry include Innocentive (www.
innocentive.com), a website which posts challenges which can be anything
from proposing syntheses of specifi c materials to projects to identify molecules
binding to a particular receptor. The successful individual or team selected is
rewarded fi nancially and also with publicity if desired. The Nature Publishing
Group also recently teamed up with Innocentive to form the Open Innovation
Pavilion such that nature.com readers could be directed to Innocentive chal-
lenges ( http://www.nature.com/openinnovation/index.html ). Another initia-
tive from Eli Lilly is phenotypic drug discovery (PD 2 , https://pd2.lilly.com/
pd2Web/), whereby scientists can submit their molecular structures via a
secure portal where they are evaluated for novelty and drug likeness. If a
molecule is selected, it is screened in phenotypic assays for diabetes, cancer,
Alzheimers', and osteoporosis. The goal of such an approach is to bring com-
pounds from academia and companies that might never have the potential to
be tested against these diseases. Obviously, Eli Lilly is then in a position to
license compounds it fi nds that are active. These types of e-science initiatives
are remarkable in bringing solutions to the companies. While Innocentive is
very specifi c to well-defi ned challenges (in general), PD 2 is sampling academic
or biotech company compound space in a less well defi ned manner. Initial
fi ltering is performed computationally and followed by various whole-cell
biology and secondary assays to perform further fi ltering. The advantage of
both such approaches are that they do not need to employ the scientifi c par-
ticipants full time or pay for the time and effort that went into the initial
synthesis of compounds tested. In both cases, signifi cant parts of the research
and development (R&D) process are essentially outsourced and the compa-
nies involved do not have to pay for that (Eli Lilly in the case of PD 2 ). Such
an approach should lead to a reduction in the costs of R&D. It will be of inter-
est to see whether other companies will adopt similar initiatives to PD 2 because
currently one company has a monopoly on this. The PD 2 approach could
potentially be applied to other parts of the R&D pipeline even as a means to