Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
pull in later stage candidates for licensing. Lilly have indicated that it will
develop a similar approach for drug targets.
A fi nal example, while not specifi c to chemistry, can reveal the value of
collaboration. It involves the Alzheimer's Disease Neuroimaging Initiative
(ADNI, http://www.adni-info.org/), which started with government organiza-
tions, academic, nonprofi t, and industry members that formed a public-private
partnership to fi nd biomarkers for the disease from clinical studies. The
National Institutes Health (NIH) serves as the coordinator between all the
organizations and the data are shared and open to all for analysis. To date it
appears that several hundred publications have been generated from the data
and many more studies are underway. The collaborative nature in this case is
helping drive the fi eld of Alzheimer ' s biomarkers forward.
5.3
COLLABORATORIES
The National Academies recently issued a report entitled “A New Biology
for the 21st Century” that describes science as more complex and more global
in nature than ever before and focused specifi cally on the biological sciences
[9] . Scientifi c software and hardware are expensive and, for many, sharing of
such technologies is essential for their progress. Software in particular can be
readily distributed within or between institutes or collaborators via collabo-
ratories. Collaboratories are a Web-based infrastructure for collaboration that
allow the sharing of computational tools and data and enable distributed
research by providing access to resources for research using the off- the - shelf
tools. Examples include BIRN (http://www.birncommunity.org/) for biomedi-
cal imaging and genetics [10] and BioCORE (http://www.ks.uiuc.edu/Research/
biocore/) for bioinformatics and computational chemistry [11]. The national
e-Science Centre at the University of Glasgow (http://www.nesc.ac.uk/hub/)
supports research collaborations that are interdisciplinary and include bioin-
formatics, clinical trials using high-performance computing, and grid-based
technologies [12-14]. The academy for medical development and collabora-
tion developed shared facilities for genomics. Other scientifi c efforts could
also be seen, for example, collaboratories such as the open-source drug dis-
covery network (http://www.osdd.net/) described in Chapter 20. Collaboratories
could become a critical component of future drug discovery efforts, particu-
larly those in countries with limited scientifi c resources or those between
academic groups.
5.4
DATABASES
One way to share scientifi c data is via public domain databases available on
the Web (Table 5.1). Astronomy, physics, biology, and chemistry have all con-
tributed enormous amounts of data to the public domain and, when available,
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