Pharma goes open access

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Pharma goes open access

Novartis shares diabetes genomic data, and experts say there's more to come

[Published 26th February 2007 03:22 PM GMT]

Swiss drug maker Novartis this month made the results of a genomic

analysis of type 2 diabetes freely available on the Internet. Such open

sharing of data might run counter to the general view of the

pharmaceutical industry, but many academics see it as part of a growing

awareness among firms that there are benefits to be had from making at

least some information publicly available.

" Data sharing is good, and it's good to see pharma catching up with

academia in this respect, " Mark McCarthy from the Oxford Centre for

Diabetes, Endocrinology and Metabolism, who is studying diabetes

genomics, told The Scientist.

Suber from the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources

Coalition pointed out in an Email that the European Research Advisory

Board (EURAB) recently urged the European Commission to mandate open

access for EU-funded research, and half of EURAB members are in

industry. " As EURAB shows, industry is starting to join with academics

to deliver this message. "

The new diabetes data came out of a collaboration between Novartis, the

University of Lund in Sweden, and the Broad Institute of MIT and

Harvard. The researchers performed a whole genome association study in

3,000 Scandinavian individuals, half of whom with type 2 diabetes. Their

aim was to search for genetic variants that influence risk of type 2

diabetes. The results are available on the Broad Web site.

Making the data freely available -- the underlying principle of open

access -- had been an important condition of the collaboration, Leif

Groop, one of the study's principal investigators from Lund, told The

Scientist. " Collaboration between two academic institutions and a drug

company could be problematic if we would allow patenting of results, " he

said via Email. " This was a way in advance to make it possible to work

together without having to compete with each other on patent issues. "

Furthermore, making the data freely available enables additional labs to

follow up on the project, which would take too many years if left in the

hands of only a few labs, Groop added. " The magnitude of the results

makes it practically impossible for one laboratory to follow up all

interesting leads. It is better that all laboratories in the world can

contribute. "

The company saw other potential benefits to working with publicly funded

institutions, who tend to want to release any and all data, said Tom

, Head of Diabetes & Metabolism Research at the Novartis

Institutes for Biomedical Research. " First, by collaborating with the

Broad and Lund groups, we have experienced first-hand how a world-class

academic partnership functions. We also have gained first-hand knowledge

regarding the design, analysis, and interpretation of large whole genome

association studies. " Lastly, he said in an Email to The Scientist,

collaborations like this are good for morale among the company's scientists.

Gasser from the Friedrich Miescher Institute in Switzerland, which

is part of the Novartis Research Foundation, told The Scientist in an

Email that by publicly disseminating its results for diabetes, the

company might lure in researchers who identify leads from the data.

" I think [Novartis] figures that if an independent investigator has

results that will help cure diabetes, [the investigator] might

eventually come back to Novartis to collaborate -- since academic labs

cannot do drug development, " she said. " Thus sharing basic genomic,

transcriptomic, and proteomic information, while unusual, makes good

sense -- both business sense and research sense. "

Other researchers contacted by The Scientist said they expected more

drug companies to make data public as high throughput screening

continues to produce enormous datasets. " It is a sign of the times and

also the way of the future, " said Tom Misteli, Senior Investigator in

the Cell Biology of Genomes Group at the National Cancer Institute.

" Making datasets available openly is a reflection of the proverbial

truth that four eyes see more than two, " he said in an Email. " Making

datasets openly available allows everyone to try their favorite tool on

a dataset, " and more easily compare different datasets. Groop agreed.

" Ten years ago everyone was expecting to get the 'big fish' and no one

cooperated, " he said. " We have matured, drug companies have matured, " he

said, causing more groups to open up their data.

Last month, Nature published a genome wide association study of SNPs

linked to type 2 diabetes risk, which found significant associations for

8 SNPs in 5 loci. " I think [the Novartis group] felt obliged to move on

in the hurry with regard of our Nature paper, " said last author Philippe

Froguel from Imperial College London. He said in an Email that the

results from the Novartis study were " moderately useful. Especially

because they [published] raw data without any further analysis, which

may be very misleading for other scientists. "

Oxford Centre's McCarthy said the decision of Novartis and its

collaborators not to keep their findings secret has already yielded

benefits. He and his team are also tackling the issue of diabetes

genomics and have shared data with the Novartis group. " It meant that we

have been able to exchange data for months now to the advantage of both

sides, " he said. " Given that it was funded by a pharmaceutical firm, if

they had gone down the secretive route neither side would have benefited. "

The SNP consortium, which involves several drug firms and biotechs, is

another example of pharmaceuticals making data public, McCarthy noted.

In another similar move, Pfizer and Affymetrix have signed up to a

public-private partnership with the NIH called the Genetic Association

Information Network (GAIN), which set out to determine the genetic

contributions to five common diseases. All data from that collaboration,

announced last year, will also be in the public domain.

Open access advocate

Stevan Harnad from the University of Southampton, UK, said the open

access movement would be reaching out directly to the R & D industry to

consolidate support for open access. " The R & D industry is beginning to

recognize the great benefits of [open access], " he said in an Email.

" They are a perfectly natural extension of the benefits, to them, of

publishing their findings in the first place. "