And Now, Pharma Goes Open Access

The monolith Swiss drug company Novartis did a bunch of research into the genetics of diabetes. And now it's making its findings freely available on the Internet.

In a word: What?

Forbes has the details:

"It will take the entire world to interpret these data," says Novartis research head Mark Fishman. "We figure we will benefit more by having a lot of companies look at these data than by holding it secret."

[An] international team compared the genomes of 1,500 people who had diabetes with 1,500 who were disease-free. All the patients were from Sweden. To do this quickly, the scientists used gene chips from biotech Affymetrix that allowed them to track 500,000 places in the genetic code where past experience has shown that there are likely to be differences.

The result: a library of genetic differences that are likely to increase a patient's risk of diabetes. Researchers don't know what most of these errant genes do, or exactly why diabetics are more likely to have these genes. That is exactly the puzzle a world's worth of scientists are needed to unravel.

This seems like a remarkably generous thing for a pharmaceutical company to do -- unless it thinks it will make more money in the long run by making the information available to everyone.

Readers, what do you think is really going on here?

Biology Goes Open Source [Forbes]