[Commons-Law] Massive Cancer Information Giveaway

[Nishant | निशाँत]

Massive Cancer Information Giveaway By Aaron Rowe
June 21, 2008 | 9:01:44 PM

<http://blog.wired.com/photos/uncategorized/2008/06/21/arrays.png>
Scientists at GlaxoSmithKline spent a small fortune studying cancer cells,
and then gave most of their precious information away -- for free -- to the
research community. That massive donation, which was announced on Friday,
could accelerate the discovery of new oncology drugs and blood tests by
giving brilliant, but underfunded, researchers a chance to pick through
boatloads of data.

For the pharmaceutical giant, sharing makes a lot of sense: They rely upon
academics and small companies to do pioneering work -- identifying new
targets for medications, discovering early warning signs, and figuring out
the underlying biological malfunctions that cause cancer. Once those
groundbreaking studies have been done, Glaxo and other large corporations
can step back into the picture and create new products.

Most of the data was gathered by microarrays, chips that can record lots of
biological information. Its new home is the caBIG website, a massive
repository of genetic information run by the National Cancer Institute.
Glaxo gave the online community information from three hundred different
sets of cells, which were taken from diseased breast, prostate, lung and
ovarian tissues.

(http://blog.wired.com/wiredscience/2008/06/massive-cancer.html)
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