Leveraging Research Failures to Accelerate Drug Discovery and Development

Abstract

Background

Research failures are one of the most significant costs associated with the estimated USD$2.6 billion price tag and 12-year time frame to bring a drug from discovery to market. The European Commission estimates that USD$20 billion are spent every year to develop innovations that have already developed elsewhere, highlighting the exorbitant cost of duplication. The competitive nature of the pharmaceutical industry is such that the voluntary sharing of information is not particularly forthcoming despite the highly publicized advantages of open science, open access, and open innovation. However, sharing research failures may be perceived as less competitively threatening because it is considered ‘useless’ to the party owning it, but highly valuable to the competition.

Method

A combination of existing legal tools and technology, such as trade secret protection, blockchain, and knowledge commons, may provide the necessary legal basis for a platform ecosystem that can incentivize and capture the value of sharing intellectual contributions (such as research failures), while protecting innovators against free-riding and unauthorized appropriation by third-parties.

Result

Not all intellectual efforts that contribute to the creation innovations can be protected by traditional forms of IP. If proprietary information necessary to create innovations cannot be adequately protected, innovators and researchers are likely to safeguard their interests at the expense of sharing.

Conclusion

A legally supported framework that proactively recognizes intellectual contributions by way of research failures, which can subsequently be translated into a revenue-sharing model, may lead to more openness, value creation, and overall acceleration of drug discovery and development.