By
James DeGiulio —

Earlier this year, GlaxoSmithKline announced an "open
innovation" strategy to help deliver new and better medicines for diseases
disproportionately affecting people living in the world's poorest countries.  Making good on that promise, GSK has
teamed up with the European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI), the U.S.
National Library of Medicine (NLM), and Collaborative Drug Discovery (CDD) to
make freely available more than 13,500 compounds that could ultimately lead to
new treatments for malaria.

The
data was generated by screening GSK's library of 2 million compounds for those
that demonstrate potent inhibition of the most deadly malaria parasite, Plasmodium falciparum, found primarily in
sub-Saharan Africa.  Kinase
inhibitors constituted a large proportion of the most potent compounds.  The
full results of the study are part of the cover story published in the May 20
issue of Nature ("Thousands of chemical starting points for antimalarial lead identification")

According
to the GSK press release, the release of
this data marks the first time that a pharmaceutical company has made the
structures of so many compounds available at no cost to researchers.  With the
structure of the compounds and information about how they affect the malaria
parasite, scientists can utilize these compounds for drug discovery or to study
their mechanism of parasite inhibition.

The
sharing of this data is an example of recent "open source" tactics
being applied to drug discovery.  EMBL-EBI
will act as the primary repository for the data on this compound set, and will
index further information that is deposited.  GSK will add more data as it is generated
and external scientists researching these compounds will be asked do the same.  The
data on the compounds can be found at the following links:

• European
Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI)
• Pubchem
• Collaborative Drug
Discovery

James
DeGiulio has a doctorate in molecular biology and genetics from
Northwestern University and is a third-year law
student at the Northwestern University School of Law.  Dr. DeGiulio
was a member of MBHB's 2009 class of summer associates, and he can be
contacted at degiulio@mbhb.com.