Vision
WISDOM vision is to approach drug discovery from a novel perspective using the most recent IT technologies. The collaboration is presently aiming at using the grid paradigm to identify potential hits in virtual screening.
Beyond virtual screening, we call for a distributed, internet-based collaboration to address one of the worst plagues of our present world, malaria. The spirit is a non-proprietary peer-production of information-embedding goods. And we propose to use the grid technology to enable such a world wide open-source like collaboration. The first step towards this vision has been achieved during the summer 2005 on the EGEE grid infrastructure where 46 million ligands were docked for a total amount of 80 CPU years in 6 weeks in the quest for new drugs. Further development of a grid-enabled virtual screening pipeline is underway in several European projects.
Regarding Intellectual Properties issues, potential collaboration partners should accept that all information including analysis of potential hits are made publicly available. If a group takes screening information and synthesizes the physical compound and tests it extensively in the wet-lab, it might establish IP on their side and can establish claims on the physical compound and its behavior in biological assays as long as they cite the source for their initial analysis correctly.
