Biopharmaceutical Company AstraZeneca wants to tap the wisdom of the crowd to help the company develop cocktails that can potentially lead to the development of new cancer drugs.
The company announced on Tuesday, Sept.22, its decision to release the preclinical data from more than 50 of its medicines as part of the open innovation non-profit biology project called DREAM Challenges, which aims to find drug combinations that can potentially treat cancer.
"As the volume and complexity of data continues to increase, it is critical to develop new methods to use data to address fundamental questions to better understand and improve biological sciences and human health," reads the DREAM Challenges website. "DREAM Challenges leverage the wisdom of the crowd to find new and better computational models and then make these methods available to all."
AstraZeneca's decision is aimed at helping advance research into combination therapy. The company said that its move to make a large data set accessible to outside researchers shows that it is committed to open innovation.
The move also shows that AstraZeneca believes that therapeutic combinations can potentially change how cancer is treated. Combining cancer therapy may increase efficacy and possibly overcome drug resistance.
The crowdsourcing project aims to look out for drug properties that make them powerful when combined.
The data to be made available include about 10,000 tested combinations that measure the potentials of drugs to damage cancer cell lines from a range of tumor types, which include lung, breast and colon cancer.
The Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute will also make genomic data for the same cell lines available to the participants of the DREAM Challenges.
"This unprecedented drug combination data set generously donated by AstraZeneca, in addition to the genomic characterization of dozens of cell lines made available by the Sanger Institute, constitutes a unique resource," said DREAM Challenges Founder Gustavo Stolovitzky, IBM program director of Translational Systems Biology and Nanobiotechnology.
Scientists who have the winning predictions for the best new cancer drug cocktails will have their ideas submitted to the journal Nature Biotechnology for publication.
Despite advances in the field of medicine, cancer remains fatal. Figures from the U.S. Centers for Disease and Control Prevention show that the disease kills more than half a million Americans per year. The disease follows heart disease as the leading cause of death in the United States.
