[opensourcepharma] a open source cure for Ebola?

Fri Aug 8 11:41:40 UTC 2014

So Ebola was just declared a public health emergency by WHO.

Considering the call by Jeremy Farrar (Welcome Trust), Peter Piot (London School) and David Heymann (ex-WHO, now UK Health Protection Agency) to test experimental treatments now (and not only on Americans) and to do so with public money and leadership (not waiting for companies to develop their own drugs the normal and slow way),
(see http://online.wsj.com/articles/experimental-medicine-and-african-ebola-1407258551),
could we write an open letter to Farrar, Piot and Heymann and proposing/demanding that this be done in an open source approach, sharing all data, crowdsourcing for more data and ideas, and possibly get more and more researchers on it?
The Welcome Trust and London School are likely supportive of an open approach, and Farrar and co. could possibly be approached beforehand to seek their support.

I'm not a good writer, but I'm sure one or several of you could develop such a letter quickly, and then we can get it out early next week, before WHO convenes that medical ethics expert committee to discuss the ethics of the accelerated clinical research (in which data sharing could be an important element)

What do people think?

________________________________
From: opensourcepharma [opensourcepharma-bounces at lists.okfn.org] on behalf of Matthew Todd [mattoddchem at gmail.com]
Sent: Thursday, August 07, 2014 6:03 PM
To: opensourcepharma at lists.okfn.org
Subject: Re: [opensourcepharma] a open source cure for Ebola?

I had an interesting day today giving a talk at Boston University. They have a former NIH-supported compound collection (http://cmld.bu.edu/science/compoundlibraries/). If a suitable bio lab could be found for an Ebola screen, they would be interested in contributing their whole collection to a screening effort in the short term, open source. This is great.

The compounds are not a repurposing library, but have interesting and diverse chemotypes. I wonder if we can use this pledge to obtain contributions from other labs, but before I start asking, I guess we need to know (John M) whether there are the facilities to handle such a screen anywhere? We're starting to talk thousands of compounds.

Gordon Conference: That's great news, John. I was just looking at their rules yesterday. They don't do "policy" conferences, but the easy thing to do there is to ensure the talks are on science, but to qualify they need to be run open source, at least to some extent. It'd be really interesting to pull that program together. Let me know (offline if you prefer) if I can help.

Best,
M

On 7 August 2014 09:57, McKew, John (NIH/NCATS) [E] <john.mckew at nih.gov<mailto:john.mckew at nih.gov>> wrote:
Just getting caught here as I was away at a Gordon conference this week.  I like the idea of crowd sourcing information using a Wiki format.  I can contact NIAID and see what resources they are deploying or gathered.  I will have to read through The papers Bernard has cited to see what was screened to find these compounds. I would guess nobody has screened a repurposing collection as large as the one we have so that might be worth doing.  The catch is this must be BSL4 level of containment and our facility can only go to BSL 2. NIAID has a faculty for BSL3 and. 4 screening so that would be an option.  When I get back to the office I will look into how interested people are in this.  When people were coming down with CM after IT injection of steroids contaminated with fungus we were able to complete a screen and release data in a publication in about 3 months from outbreak.  In that case we did not find anything new.

On another note I introduced the concept of a Gordon Med Chem session on Open Source  Drug Discovery and Development at the planning session last night.  At first the idea was met with complete silence but after I sold it to the group I was able to gain enough enthusiasm to get this accepted into the next stage of decision making.  I will let everyone what I hear next.  As Matt mentioned at Bellagio this is primarily a very conservative group of med chemists so this was a nice surprise.
John

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