Dear all,
I mentioned many months ago - some time in early 2015 - that GridRepublic in Boston offered to take over the server management of FiND@H.
It was - and still is - my intention to make results from the FiND@H project publically available. I've built a website that displays the first results -
http://chemware.ucd.ie/FiNDaH/.
The idea is that anyone, anywhere, has access to this data and can validate the results in the lab.
That's where things get tricky. If an academic lab - or for that matter a biotech company - puts their own time and money into validating these data, then they get the patents and profit. Ideally government money should pay for these validation studies - socialising the profits - but as I am in Ireland and computational drug discovery is off the bottom of the priority list, I repeatedly failed to get funding for the validation studies from the HRB, SFI and EI research funding agencies.
I am now no longer employed to be a research scientist and have been forced to take an admin role at a college to break out of the annual contract life of postdocs. Hence the project went dormant until GR picked it up again.
But I still want the results validated in the lab. I repeatedly tried to get funding from the Gates foundation, but ironically they refused to fund projects that where computational. I tried croudfunding, and the generous donations we received covered the cost of new hard drives - a far cry from the 100,000s needed to support lab validation studies.
So I'm still hopeful that some angel investor will swoop in and offer to validate the work. Will the profits be shared? - no. My contract with the FiND@H volunteers ends with porting the data onto the web. Now anyone in the world with deep pockets can take advantage of the data. The risk is still high and there is no final guarantee. Of course I hope I'm right, and that this project works. But the person who puts hard cash down to validate the data is the one who walks away with the spoils. At the moment this could be a lab/company in India or South Africa or wherever... for all I know.
I'm just delighted that GridRepublic have offered to keep the project alive... I think we could use this method for all sorts of infectious diseases, given the chance. In the end I hope someone, somewhere, puts in the effort to validate the data in vitro.
Ciao,
Ant
Ps: I have not heard of any BOINC project socialising the profits from the computation work. For instance, the WCG project similar to ours - Go Fight Malaria At Home - also put all their data online. I have no idea if this has been validated in house by them - then they could hold patents on good results and license to large pharma and (potentially) make profits from it. I have no idea... just saying. The nett result of this work are possible hypothetical interactions, which will take a lot of time and money to validate.
