Paul Bleicher

Recently, I have been exposed to some of the most interesting examples of Web 2.0 in medicine, and I have begun to see an even greater potential for Web 2.0 in our industry, but also a substantial risk for the future of clinical trials and pharmacovigilance, especially in serious disease indications with small numbers of patients.

It occurs to me that the Pandora myth may be a telling metaphor for some aspects of Web 2.0 for the biopharmaceutical industry. In the Pandora myth, after Prometheus steals fire from the gods and gives it to mortal men, Zeus creates the beautiful and seductive first woman, Pandora, to punish men. Pandora is given a jar (erroneously described as a "box") and told not to open it, but curiosity overcomes her and she does—releasing all the evils of mankind. She closes the jar quickly enough to keep Hope inside.

Web sites and communities designed with a Web 2.0 philosophy are powerful tools for the participants in these communities. Virtually unregulated interaction and collaboration can generate information and knowledge far greater than the sum of the individual's knowledge. This is one of the key messages in the book, Wikinomics, by Don Tapscott and Anthony Williams. A story from this book that dramatically illustrates this point is that of Rob McEwen, chief executive officer of Goldcorp, a gold mining company.

In 1999, Goldcorp owned 55,000 acres in Canada that had been seemingly mined to exhaustion, although there were some hints of data suggesting that gold might still be found in the mines. However, company geologists couldn't agree on whether these leads were significant or worth pursuing. Inspired by a conference at MIT on open source software, McEwen made a bold and astounding move: He created a contest on the Web with cash prizes totaling $575,000 to be awarded to the best suggestions as to where to mine the gold. His company posted all the proprietary geologic data they had on the region on their Web site.

The response to this challenge was beyond McEwen's imagination. Submissions from 52 geologists reaped 110 potential deposits, of which half were previously unknown by the company. Many contestants won prizes from $10,000 to $100,000, and 10 were actually hired by the company. An astounding 80% of the identified deposits yielded a useful amount of gold, and the company has since mined over 8 million ounces of gold (currently in futures markets near $1000 per ounce, retail!). If ever there was a demonstration of the collective power of the Web, this is it. Unleashing power of this magnitude is surely akin to Prometheus bringing fire to earth.

The usefulness of this model for collaboration is being tested in the pharmaceutical industry by Innocentive ( http://www.innocentive.com/). In this collaboration marketplace, major pharmaceutical and food companies are posting challenges anonymously for some of their most difficult problems in discovery, medicinal chemistry, manufacturing, assay development, and even clinical trials statistics.

Potential solvers of these problems can register and submit solutions to the challenges, with hopes of winning prizes from $5000 to $1 million for accepted solutions. Participating companies have awarded over $3 million so far for 215 solutions, with solvers coming from India, China, Eastern Europe, and even the United States. Many of the successful solvers aren't even trained in the same field as the problem. Despite the risks of competitive disclosure, companies post challenges because the power of the Web exceeds, by order of magnitudes, the resources they could make available within their own companies.