Richard Gold (McGill University) and Max Morgan (SGC, M4k Pharma) penned an opinion piece in the Globe and Mail discussing how open science projects with no patents can result in local economic development, citing the recent $1Billion investment deal that Celgene signed with the Ontario Institute for Cancer Research (OICR) and their commercialization arm FACIT to advance a potential drug for leukemia.

How can a company take advantage of regulatory exclusivity to launch an open science drug discovery program? Max Morgan et al explain in their paper.

OICR-funded drug discovery project’s unique ‘open science’ business model is accelerating the search for a solution to lethal pediatric brain cancers.

Reaction Biology Corporation (“RBC”), a leading contract research organization providing early stage drug discovery services, announced that it has partnered with M4K Pharma (“M4K”), an open science drug discovery and development company, in the fight against diffuse intrinsic pontine glioma (or DIPG), a rare pediatric brain cancer with no curative therapies.

Watch the M4K team in Toronto complete the #LemonFaceChallenge to spread DIPG awareness, along with the Structural Genomics Consortium (SGC) and the Ontario Institute for Cancer Research (OICR).

In a podcast interview with Bio2040, CEO Owen Roberts discusses M4K Pharma’s business model and why open science and sharing can be the path to finding medicines for rare diseases like DIPG.

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.