In 2003, a group of scientists and executives from the NIH, the FDA, the drug and medical-imaging industries, universities and nonprofit groups joined in a project that had no precedent: a collaborative effort to find the biological markers that show the progression of Alzheimer’s disease in the human brain. The collaboration is already serving as a model for similar efforts against Parkinson’s disease.

Organized by Michael Weiner, Center for Imaging of Neurodegenerative Diseases (CIND), UCSF, and Olga Brazhnik, NCRR

Large amounts of data are being generated annually on the connection between the sequence, structure and function of proteins. However, much experimental data are never deposited in databases and is thus ‘lost’ in journal publications or in PhD theses. At the same time theoretical scientists are in need of large amounts of experimental data for benchmarking and calibrating.

Contemporary bioscience sometimes demands vast sample sizes and there is often then no choice but to synthesize data across several studies and to undertake an appropriate pooled analysis. This same need is also faced in health-services and socio-economic research. When a pooled analysis is required, analytic efficiency and flexibility are often best served by combining the individual-level data….

A new database of more than 4,000 Alzheimer’s disease patients who have participated in 11 industry-sponsored clinical trials will be released today by the Coalition Against Major Diseases (CAMD). This is the first database of combined clinical trials to be openly shared by pharmaceutical companies and made available to qualified researchers around the world.

NEWSWEEK Cover Story, May 24, 2010 – How the road from promising scientific breakthrough to real-world remedy has become all but a dead end. Private foundations have veered away from the NIH model, requiring scientists to share data and do the nonsexy development work required after a discovery is made.

Blog by Luke Timmerman – Sage Bionetworks, the Seattle-based nonprofit seeking to spark a movement toward open-source style sharing of biological data, is announcing today it has secured a partnership with Pfizer, the world’s largest pharmaceutical company.
Financial terms, and the length of the collaboration, aren’t being disclosed. But the deal will bring in enough cash for Sage to add some [...]

Rees is a principal scientist at Science Commons’ Neurocommons Project. A computer scientist, he worked in Millennium Pharmaceuticals’ computational biology group before joining Science Commons. At the company his work focused on large-scale curated protein interaction networks.