A new editorial has just been published in ecancer entitled Accelerating target discovery using pre-competitive open science— patients need faster innovation more than anyone else.

Written by Eric Low, Chas Bountra and Wen Hwa Lee it highlights the importance of open science and collaborative working. In particular, it discusses the innovative partnership between the Structural Genomics Consortium (SGC)—an open, pre-competitive pre-clinical research consortium and the research-focused patient organisation Myeloma UK to create a new, comprehensive platform to accelerate the discovery and development of new treatments for myeloma.

The editorial also explains how an open and sharing approach is being taken to better understand this complex disease and to seek new targeted treatments, from assessing the importance of epigenetics regulators as potential targets to treat myeloma to trying to enhance susceptibility of myeloma cells to existing treatments.

The results of the research will be open and publicly available, without patent to encourage other scientists to join their cause and to speed up the development of new medicines for patients. 

Read the editorial in full here.