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LONDON, Sept 22 (Reuters) - Drugmaker AstraZeneca isharnessing the wisdom of crowds to help mix tomorrow's cancerdrug cocktails.
The company said on Tuesday its decision to releasepreclinical data from more than 50 of its medicines wasunprecedented in scale and would help accelerate the hunt forsynergistic tumour-fighting drug combinations.
The crowd sourcing initiative is being run as part of theDREAM Challenge, an open innovation non-profit biology projectin which scientists pool ideas and crunch data.
AstraZeneca's decision to make a large data set available tooutside researchers is a further example of the drugs industryexploring ways to share research at an early pre-competitivestage.
The data includes around 10,000 tested combinationsmeasuring the ability of drugs to destroy cancer cell lines fromdifferent tumour types and it will be matched with genomicinformation from the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute.
Scientists with winning predictions for the best new cancerdrug combinations will have their ideas submitted forpublication in the journal Nature Biotechnology.
(Reporting by Ben Hirschler, editing by Louise Heavens)
