The Wall Street Journal reports that, in a bid to find a new and effective drug to treat malaria, drug maker Glaxo is sharing basic research data on the net. The move is billed as a test of open source principles in the development of new chemical compounds.

The article, titled Glaxo Tries a Linux Approach, says the move is a major open source initiative, but is not quite clear how far Glaxo will go in actually opening any resulting intellectual property up for use by others.

Glaxo says that it won’t seek patents on any malaria drug that the compounds yield, and hopes other researchers will also donate their intellectual property to a patent pool for so-called neglected diseases like malaria. If the Glaxo compounds are used to develop a drug for other types of diseases, then the company “would consider” the intellectual-property issues, a Glaxo spokeswoman said.

The move by Glaxo is uncharacteristic for a major pharmaceutical company and it will be interesting to see where the initiative will lead. Mr. Cammack, a Glaxo exec quoted in the article says he hopes the open-source work will influence Glaxo more broadly in the future, particularly given the challenges big pharmaceuticalcompanies face in launching new drugs. “The pharmaceutical industry needs to look at lots of ways of doing business in the future,” he said.

The move is one of the largest experiments yet by the pharmaceutical industry to apply techniques of open-source development to drug discovery, based on the idea that collaboration by volunteers will create products that aren’t owned by a single company.

In software, the approach has spawned the Linux operating system, MySQL database and an array of other programs. Those community-born technologies now compete with products from Microsoft Corp., Oracle Corp. and other traditional, commercial software makers. Open-source developers share programming instructions called source code that software companies traditionally kept confidential.

Similarly, large pharmaceutical companies tightly guard their formulas for drugs and other intellectual property. Any given chemical compound holds the potential to be a blockbuster drug—and a cash cow, like Microsoft’s Windows software. But diseases like malaria afflict mainly poor populations, and drugs to treat them don’t hold the promise for such a big payoff—making experiments like Glaxo’s less risky.

The Glaxo effort builds off earlier open-source drug efforts that included a nonprofit organization called Tropical Disease Initiative and a project started last year that opens compounds from Pfizer Inc. to researchers at a nonprofit called Drugs for Neglected Disease Initiative.

Wall Street Journal link: Glaxo Tries a Linux Approach