Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
22.4 Open source software in the
pharmaceutical industry
It takes teams of thousands of scientists, billions of dollars and many
years of hard work to produce a new medicine. The risks are huge, and
competition between pharmaceutical companies is intense, as there are
no prizes for being second to patenting the same molecule. As a
consequence, pharmaceutical companies are as security-conscious as
those in the defence industry. Security is not the only concern for IT
departments in the pharmaceutical industry. As soon as a potential new
pharmaceutical product reaches clinical testing, there are a huge set of
rules that must be followed to ensure that everything is done reproducibly
and correctly. A huge amount of effort is put into validating these systems
(see Chapter 21 by Stokes), which would need to be re-done at great
expense if things change. This means that there must be an extensive
support network behind these systems, and with that appropriate contacts
and guarantees.
An IT manager is much more confi dent of getting support from a large
software company, which offers teams of experts and global support for
its software for a decade or more, than the hope that someone on a
support Wiki might be able to offer a suggestion when something goes
wrong. These large software companies have strong patent protection on
their software, which enables them to make money from their work. This
enables them to grow into global corporations, capable of offering 24/7
support teams of experts in many languages, and legal protection of
millions of dollars to their customers if data were to leak or service be
interrupted. As such, the pharmaceutical industry has generally been
slow to adopt open source software, simply because it does not offer the
protections and support guarantees of a commercial counterpart.
However, where those protections do exist (for example, from RedHat
for its version of Linux), open source software can quickly appear in the
data centres and scientifi c workstations of pharmaceutical companies.
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22.5 Open source as a catalyst for
pre-competitive collaboration in
the pharmaceutical industry
The past few pages have outlined how the pharmaceutical industry
has recently found itself pulled in two contradictory directions. On
 
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