Developers bet on prediction models

Rival drug developers may become allies in an MIT project called New Drug Development Paradigms. Among the project aims: New prediction models and more open sharing of information about the biology of diseases.

Project participants include both big pharma and federal health authorities, according to a New York Times article. One idea from the project, launched last spring, is dead-end drug disclosure: The sharing of information about compounds that drugmakers have attempted to develop but that subsequently failed. The hope is to eliminate the millions of research dollars ultimately spent on unhappy results.

In the meantime, some researchers have turned to crowdsourcing as a predictor of successes and failures. Pharmer's Market is an online prediction destination that taps virtual bet-placing drug development experts to gauge the likelihood that a drug candidate will succeed or fail.

As reported earlier, Imaginatik and CambridgeSoft teamed to produce the crowdsource-based ChemBioConnect, which supports cooperative visualizations of chemical structures and biological systems. The product is intended for biopharma and chemistry researchers and includes the virtual betting element.

- here's the Pharmer's Market announcement
- see our earlier crowdsourcing coverage
- read the NYT article

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