In January 2018, a group of post-doctoral fellows at the Structural Genomics Consortium (SGC) undertook the bold task of sharing their real-time and unpolished experimental results through open lab notebooks online in a mission to facilitate collaboration and transparency and to reduce duplication of effort.

In an Editorial to the Canadian Science Policy Centre, Drs. Aled Edwards and Aidan Hollis describe the need for Open Source Drug Discovery to address the inefficiencies in developing new drugs and the resulting exorbitant prices of new medicines.

The Ontario Institute for Cancer Research (OICR) announced its Cancer Therapeutics Innovation Pipeline (CTIP) initiative and the first 10 projects selected for the inaugural round of funding. CTIP will support the local translation of Ontario discoveries into therapies by creating a new drug development pipeline and by working with the research teams to attract further investments for clinical development.

The latest medical innovation to spring from Aled Edwards’s University of Toronto lab isn’t a new protein structure or potential drug target – it’s a business model.

Thanks to advances in genomics research, it’s rapidly becoming apparent many illnesses can be splintered into ever smaller categories of disease, each affecting a relatively small number of people. Hence all the buzz about developing “personalized” medicines.