Leveraging Research Failures to Accelerate Drug Discovery and Development

Area of Science:

• Pharmaceutical Research and Development
• Intellectual Property Law
• Open Innovation

Background:

• Drug development costs an estimated $2.6 billion and takes 12 years.
• Duplication of research efforts costs approximately $20 billion annually.
• The pharmaceutical industry's competitive nature limits voluntary information sharing, despite open science benefits.

Purpose of the Study:

• To explore a framework for sharing research failures to reduce costs and accelerate drug discovery.
• To address the challenges of protecting intellectual contributions in an open innovation ecosystem.

Main Methods:

• Utilizing legal tools like trade secret protection and blockchain technology.
• Establishing a platform ecosystem for incentivizing and capturing the value of shared intellectual contributions.
• Developing a revenue-sharing model for intellectual contributions, including research failures.

Main Results:

• Traditional intellectual property (IP) protection is insufficient for all innovation-related efforts.
• Lack of adequate IP protection for proprietary information hinders sharing among innovators.
• Sharing research failures can be valuable to competitors without posing a significant competitive threat.

Conclusions:

• A legally supported framework can recognize intellectual contributions like research failures.
• This framework can foster greater openness, value creation, and faster drug discovery.
• Implementing revenue-sharing models for shared research failures can incentivize participation.