PANDEMIC THREATS SPUR DEVELOPMENT OF GLOBAL HEALTH COMMONS

By Mark Sommer and - - Reprint | | Print |

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ARCATA, CALIFORNIA, May 25 2009 (IPS) - The specter of a swine flu pandemic has driven home the urgent need for more rapid and effective responses to a wide range of public health threats. But in order to respond more effectively, we need to create a more open system for the exchange of vital health information and research across sectors, disciplines, geographic, economic and cultural boundaries. In a world of increasingly global emergencies, we need all hands on deck, including the patients and publics most affected.

Pioneers in medical and scientific research are now laying the foundations for a global health commons, a medical information and innovation exchange system that could greatly accelerate the pace and enhance the effectiveness of crucial discoveries. Based largely online for global reach, access, and affordability, they believe such a common resource could serve as a meeting place and clearinghouse where stakeholders in diverse dimensions of public and personal health could find one another, share the results of their experiments, identify common challenges, and collaborate in designing solutions to them.

The concept of an open source health commons orginates in part with Internet commerce pioneer Marty Tenenbaum. In 1998 he was at the peak of success as a Silicon Valley entrepreneur, launching the first commercial Internet transactions and web-based auctions, when he was struck by a rare form of melanoma. Frustrated by the lack of drug treatments for his illness, he launched an online patient-researcher alliance called CollabRx (www.collabRx.com ) that facilitates the creation of virtual biotech companies to speed the research process to develop treatments for diseases that wouldn’t otherwise receive the attention of major pharmaceutical companies.

On average, says Tenenbaum, the development of a major new drug takes seventeen years and a billion dollars. With numbers like these, most pharmaceutical companies focus on so-called “blockbuster drugs” with millions of potential customers. Some of these drugs address widely felt needs but many cater more to affluent consumers ready to spend lavishly for enhanced beauty or pleasure. This system of skewed incentives neglects the vast majority of “orphaned” diseases that kill or disable millions of mostly poor people worldwide but won’t generate the profits drug companies are looking for. CollabRx brings doctors and researchers, those most knowledgeable about medical science, together with patients, those most motivated to push for a cure.

With the development of computational biology, some kinds of medical trials can be conducted at a cost that even a group of patients can collectively afford to finance. Just as patients are desperate for a cure, many doctors and researchers are desperate to develop treatments for diseases long thought incurable.

A related experiment in open source science has already proven remarkably successful. The Public Library of Science (www.plos.org) was launched in 2000 by Nobel prize-winning scientist Harold Varmus and other eminent medical researchers. Their goal is to “open the doors to the world’s library of scientific knowledge by giving any scientist, physician, patient, or student anywhere in the world unlimited access to the latest scientific research.” In just nine years, PLoS’ largely online publications have grown to seven journals ranging from computational biology to neglected tropical diseases.

Now it has launched PLoS One, a unique experiment in rapid, researcher-financed publication of a huge volume of peer-reviewed scientific papers. Morever, PLoS One is equipped with innovative user tools that enable readers to comment on and rate papers in open dialogue with their authors. Gavin Yamey, a senior editor at PLoS, calls it “Open Access 2.0” and believes that scientific publishers will soon find it no longer possible to continue locking promising research behind legal and financial barriers. The genius of crowd-sourced creativity is out of the bottle, and in the view of many in the open innovation movement that’s all to the good.

In the silo-ed world of medical and scientific research, doctors speak primarily to doctors, researchers to researchers, patients to doctors and sometimes to each other. But in the kind of world where pandemics spread with stunning speed, we need to peer over the walls of the institutional and cultural compartments that separate us, to compare experiences and collaborate in devising solutions to common threats. What better place to start than with the human body? Each of us is in effect an experiment station constantly observing and adapting to changing circumstances. And each of us is potentially an inventor, a discoverer of new and better ways to regain and maintain health.

Global emergencies like swine flu illustrate the need to more freely exchange information about what’s working and what’s not, so we can quickly and efficiently adapt, adopt, and share the results of our experiments. In the case of health, both public and personal, we need to bring millions more people and many more constituencies into the innovation process. Patients, victims of diseases who can’t obtain care, traditional and alternative healers, innovators not housed within existing institutions and therefore sometimes freer to think anew: the experience of all these and more are essential to effectively address the increasingly complex challenges we now face.

The greater challenge will be to overcome deep-seated structural barriers and longstanding patterns of competition and isolation. Competitive relationships and institutional imperatives are not innately counterproductive, but they’ve too often prevented much needed cooperation. Now we’re forced by necessity to collaborate as never before because the challenges we face require a diversity of skills and perspectives. There is no more appropriate field to begin that convergence than in the quest for cures to the world’s most devastating diseases. (END/COPYRIGHT IPS)

(*) Mark Sommer hosts the award-winning, internationally syndicated radio program, A World of Possibilities (www.aworldofpossibilities.org).