Article by Natalia de la Figuera – Co-founder and COO of GENESIS Biomed

• The core idea of Open innovation is that companies leverage the ideas and resources of external actors such as customers, suppliers, universities, start-ups, etc.

• By sharing knowledge and resources, companies can reduce duplication of effort, increase efficiency and accelerate the discovery and development of new drugs.

• In the last decade, there have been introduced more participatory methods like Crowdsourcing or Open-Source Initiative

• Herbal products can be used alone or in addition to conventional therapies, but their use should always be assessed by a health professional.

Open Innovation (OI) was a term coined by Professor Henry Chesbrough in 2003 in his book “Open Innovation: the new imperative for creating and profiting from technology”. Chesbrough referred to open Innovation as a shift from a previously internally driven and vertically integrated (closed innovation), to a more holistic and open understanding of innovation. The central idea of Open Innovation is that companies can no longer rely exclusively on their own internal research and development to innovate, create value and bring their solutions to market. Instead, companies can tap into the ideas and resources of external actors such as customers, suppliers, universities, start-ups, and other organisations to develop new products and services, improve processes and generate new business opportunities.  Open Innovation is about opening the company’s doors to new sources of knowledge, ideas and collaboration, and can have a positive impact on companies’ competitiveness and profitability.

The OI aims to address some of the challenges faced by industry, such as the high cost of drug development, the long time to approval and the difficulty of finding new drug targets. By sharing knowledge and resources, companies can reduce duplication of effort, increase efficiency and accelerate drug discovery and development.

Until 2010, most traditional R&D was based primarily on internal R&D, complemented by mergers and acquisitions, licensing, Venture Capital funds and R&D collaborations with academic (PPP) and industrial partners. Although these companies thus incorporate some external sources of knowledge, they still retained intellectual property and controlled most of the innovation work.

But in the last decade, more participatory methods have been incorporated that aim to accelerate innovation with the contribution of ideas from a wider range of stakeholders belonging to the health innovation ecosystem.

Some of these are described below:

Crowdsourcing:

It is a process of problem solving, idea generation or content creation by eliciting contributions from many people, harnessing the collective knowledge, creativity and skills of a diverse group of individuals, often from different geographic locations and backgrounds.

Crowdsourcing initiatives can take various shapes, such as idea-generating contests, open innovation challenges and science projects, etc. Crowdsourcing can also be more cost-effective than traditional problem-solving approaches, as it allows organisations to leverage a global pool of talent and resources.

However, crowdsourcing initiatives can also face challenges such as managing large numbers of contributions, ensuring quality and relevance, and maintaining intellectual property rights. Nevertheless, with the rise of the internet and social media, crowdsourcing has become an increasingly popular tool for innovation and problem solving across industries and sectors.

Some initiatives of this type promoted by pharmaceutical companies have been: CoSolveChallenge (AstraZeneca) o Grants4-Iniciatives (Bayer).

Open-Source Initiative:

In the context of the pharmaceutical industry, open source refers to a collaborative and open approach to drug or solutions discovery and development, where pharmaceutical companies and researchers share their data, tools and knowledge to accelerate the development of new medicines.

Examples of open-source initiatives in pharmaceutical companies include the Structural Genomics Consortium (SGC), which aims to accelerate the discovery of new drug targets by making its research results publicly available. Another example was the COVID-19 Host Genetics Initiative launched in early 2020 globally to investigate the genetic determinants of COVID-19 susceptibility and severity. The initiative brought together a large number of researchers and institutions from around the world, with the aim of identifying genetic factors that could influence the risk of COVID-19 infection, as well as disease severity and clinical outcomes.

The initiative involved the collection and analysis of large-scale genetic data from COVID-19 patients as well as control populations. The data was used to identify genetic variants associated with susceptibility and severity of COVID-19, and to understand the underlying mechanisms involved in these associations in order to design more appropriate and effective therapies.

Nonetheless, the initiatives outlined above still have challenges to overcome, from coordination between entities with very different cultures and internal processes to intellectual property issues. But they also have the potential to transform the way drugs are discovered and developed, leading to more affordable and accessible medicines for patients around the world.