Stem Cells on eBay: Could This Be the Future of Science?

Ruby Tuesday Pick of the Week: Science Commons
Why It’s a Gem: Eliminating red tape and developing new protocols makes sharing research easier than ever – which puts all cures within closer reach

Researchers around the world are hard at work on cures for most every ailment and disease. But until now, there was no system – let alone incentive – for sharing their discoveries, leaving researchers working independently in their own silos, possibly duplicating the same mistakes as their colleagues around the globe. It wasn’t unusual for decades to pass before any significant progress was made on a study.

But that’s all changing. Just as parent organization Creative Commons has made sharing artistic endeavors both easy and profitable, Science Commons is using that same open-access model to enable the scientific research community to both find and share their studies, thereby enabling an approach to sharing data that just might revolutionize the scientific world. My interview with John Wilbanks was a fitting way to cap off Open Access Week. (This interview has been edited for clarity and length.)

Lynda Resnick: In this week’s Ruby Tuesday, we are speaking with John Wilbanks, Vice-President of Science at Science Commons. For our readers, John, will you describe your organization’s purpose and what is unique about it in the marketplace?

John Wilbanks: We are a part of a larger organization called Creative Commons, which looks to reduce the transaction costs associated with sharing property through the network. That could be property like copyrights, or property like stem cells or patents. What we do is create legal and technical tools that make it easy for the owners of this kind of property to post it online under a low transaction-cost license, and to make it clear to end users what rights have been granted. We call it a “some bytes reserved” approach.

At Creative Commons, we look at ourselves as an infrastructure provider and a standards body that make it possible for this sort of activity to take place. Complex issues require lots of different things to come together to form a solution. The resistance to starting Facebook is very low; the resistance to starting a drug company investigating a rare disease is very high. Resistance [hampers efficiency]. We want that resistance to go away.

John Wilbanks, Vice President of Science at Science Commons | Photo by Nick Vedros

LR: Good, we do too. Speaking as an entrepreneur who is excited about the health of the planet, your business model is a very interesting place to start. Could this model also help food companies understand how to make their products healthier?

JW: Here’s an example of that. Take what Merck is doing with their disease biology platform – $200 million worth of super-fancy data-computing models that let you evaluate either the impact of a drug in a population or, in this case, a food itself. A lot of what they did at Merck was on obesity, and what they’ve analyzed is that diet actually activates a set of genes associated with growth, but not muscle growth. So, they fed mice what they called the “McDonald’s diet,” and they were able to systematically identify biological networks that are activated by a high-fat, high-salt, Western-style diet. It provides a very good way to analyze anything that goes into the body and to see its impact.

This was previously the exclusive province of Merck Pharmaceuticals. Over the next year or so, all of that data and software is going to move into the public domain, out into the Commons. And that means that companies can begin to run the same experiments that Merck did. That’s just the short-term benefit. Over time it creates a standard way for those companies to communicate their results with each other, because they’re going to use the same data formats, the same naming conventions…

LR: Fantastic! Let me understand one more time, because it seems too good to be true: All of Science Commons’ offerings are free on the web?

JW: Everything we do is free. We’re a neutral third party, so we’ve been funded by philanthropic grants. We’re moving towards a business model where we do actual nonprofit services. The most recent funding we’ve gotten is from Nike, Yahoo, Best Buy, and Mountain Equipment Co-Op to design a set of patent licenses that allows them to take their sustainability technologies and make them publically available under [specialized licenses], so they can begin to work as a group and identify [what has already been accomplished so they] don’t have to replicate the work.

Think of it like being on the Internet. The Internet is defined by a set of free protocols. You don’t have to ask permission to connect to the Internet or put up a web page. In the same way, you shouldn’t have to ask permission or pay to use one of our tools. The Commons is a network that’s defined by open standards. That means you have to have openness at the core. It’s designed to allow for both for-profit and nonprofit uses in the same way the Internet is used both for for-profit and nonprofit uses. But at its core, it needs to be an open system.

LR: It’s the web of culture, coming to the web of science. So, your organization is based on science neutrality, right?

JW: That’s a part of it. We’ve seen an explosion of innovation in our culture. We take for granted that we can get online and order a hotel room and read reviews about it, [then go and] find a restaurant near it. And we don’t stop and think, “This is extraordinary! Look what we can do that we couldn’t do 15 years ago!”

That same sort of capability and functionality hasn’t really happened in the [scientific] knowledge space. What we want to do is look for infrastructure that enables [the transfer of knowledge both] legally and technically. Because it’s not just law and technology [that is hampering knowledge exchange]. A lot of it is the scientific institutions [who are] resistant to change.

LR: Right. So, what is your business model?

JW: We’re a non-profit organization, but we operate very entrepreneurially. We raise money through philanthropic grants from organizations like the MacArthur Foundation, the Kauffman Foundation for Entrepreneurship. We also raise money from foundations that invest directly into disease research. So, the Cure Huntington’s Disease Initiative and other such organizations have a real mandate to work together, because unlike the NIH or a big pharmaceutical company, they don’t have the level of money it takes to get a drug on the market, so they’re looking for ways to work together, and they’ve been investing in us since the beginning. We have an interest in bringing those sorts of foundations together and, particularly in the role of biobanks, to make the tools of the life scientist democratized and available.

Creative Commons Salon at PariSoMa | Photo by disrupsean

LR: How long has Science Commons been around?

JW: We’ve been an active product of Creative Commons for five years.

LR: Do you have any success stories from your first five years to share with us? Anything that you’ve moved along that would have taken a lot longer had you not had this wonderful idea going?

JW: Sure. So, there are two phases of the project. The first phase [involved] looking at fundamental research and intervention, figuring out exactly where standardized contracts and standardized technologies that deal with properties and transactions could have a transformative impact. The first thing we did was look at scholarly journals, which is the primary vehicle that academics use for most of their science knowledge, and it’s a very analog way of doing things. [One of the most obvious places to start was] to get those journals to move around more freely so that people who wanted to read them could read them.

Since we got started, the numbers of journals under a Creative Commons liberal copyright license has gone from [roughly] 50 to [roughly] 1,000. Most of that [increase] has come from the businesses that are actually practicing open access as a new sort of constructive business model. Those are the drivers for the adoption, so we don’t try to take much credit for that.

Then we began to look at data and databases. There’s a tendency to [apply] open source reasoning, or free culture reasoning, and say [that we should use] these same sorts of free licenses on databases to achieve open source data. We actually took a contrarian position and said that licenses weren’t the answer; the public domain was the most effective way to deal with data. We put out a protocol on how to do that and then, over the last year or so, we’ve begun to see the adoption curves go up. So, in the free and open science space, we’ve seen [such important research organizations as] the Personal Genome Project at Harvard Medical School adopt this private public domain approach.

And, in the last couple of months, Merck has decided to take their entire human disease biology modeling software and data, and invest that into a nonprofit organization called Sage Bionetworks, which is in the process of adopting that very protocol for hundreds of millions of dollars of privately generated data.

What you find over and over again is that [simplifying] sharing is complicated. So, that’s where we started. In the life sciences, there’s a fundamental lack of access to the stuff that’s in research refrigerators and freezers – actual materials that you use to make data or write papers about. The goal is [to create] eBay- or Amazon-style affiliate programs for these sorts of studies, especially if they’re taxpayer funded. So, we’ve worked with a network of biobanks – particularly the Coriell Cell Repository, Jackson Laboratory up in Maine – and our first real successes [have come from putting] a set of stem cells online that will be available for any qualified researcher in the world to start doing stem cell research, instead of having to send an email to someone who’s written a paper and begging them for the stem cells.

LR: So, these stem cells will be available through Science Commons?

JW: The stem cells will be available through a third-party, called a biobank, [which is operating under the open-source protocol created by Science Commons]. It’s sort of like a greenhouse-culturing facility: In the same way that you would order your plants from a greenhouse, you can go online and order your stem cells from this cell greenhouse. What we did was broker a deal, write the contracts, and make sure the technology worked in a way that really makes it look like e-commerce. The goal is not political idea freedom; the goal is [to foster the development of] the different ways that we share. One of the ways we share is through open licensing. But another one of the ways that we share is simply by destroying the old boy’s club. [We're dismantling the old process of denying information based on how powerful a person is and replacing it with] a one-click ecology where you can provide your credit card info and order the stem cells. That’s how you begin to unleash the power.

LR: And then the whole world is working on the problem, instead of just the precious few. Fantastic! Where’s the financial model? There are a lot of drug companies and research labs that make their money doing research. What does this mean to them?

JW: Those sorts of companies get paid mainly for therapeutic interventions – drugs or diagnostic systems. And the fundamental tools used to discover those things are exactly what we want to be open. We’ve actually found that that focus has made us very good friends with these sorts of companies. They would rather compete on finding the drug than [compete] on getting access to the platform that will lead to the discovery of the drug.

LR: So, it’s not that they will be out of business. It’s quite the opposite. They’ll have more tools at their disposal to conduct their research, because those tools will be more readily available.

JW: Exactly. [That helps reduce] the overall cost, [because it reduces the cost of each phase of research. If each phase is expensive in itself, then it might reach] a point where it’s not worth investigating a disease, because you know that you won’t be able to make enough money to justify it in the long term.

LR: Exactly. There are a lot of researched diseases that are terribly underfunded, and this would be a wonderful way of solving those problems. Some diseases only affect a small population, so it doesn’t seem financially viable to research a cure. But if the research were available to other researchers around the world, the cure might be closer in sight. If you wait for a drug company to do it, it’ll never happen, because there just isn’t enough money in it.

JW: And the drug companies like this [new approach] as well, because they want their researchers to have every possible tool on the shelf. They don’t want their researchers to be denied any tool that might lead to an answer. They don’t want to have to negotiate and purchase every single research tool as if were itself the Holy Grail, when in reality it’s but one piece in a very complicated puzzle. That’s where the eBay and Amazon models come into play. We need to bring that e-commerce piece of the web to science, not just the freedom of open source.

LR: Wonderful. You know, you’re one of the great heroes of the 21st century.

JW: Tell that to my wife and my parents.

LR: We own a company called Wonderful that sells pomegranate juice, and we’ve put $32 million dollars of research into it so far, because pomegranates are quite amazing in what they do for prostate cancer and cardiac health. Is there any way that a private company such as POM can benefit or contribute to the goals of sharing research?

JW: I think so. Let’s say that a private company commissions a study to [determine] the genetic reaction of the human body to drinking pomegranate juice. That information on its own is valuable, and that’s what traditional research is all about. [In the traditional model of sharing scientific knowledge, the data is analyzed, peer reviewed, and submitted to a paid review journal.] But hopefully, [with the new protocols that Science Commons is implementing,] you’ll be able to take that information and put it on the web in a standardized format. From there, [it can then be] integrated into a network of data, such as with studies on how humans react to natural compounds. Or it can be connected to someone who’s doing a chemical analysis of pomegranate juice and looking at the actual sets of metabolites that make it what it is. We can begin to connect that to clinical studies of the impact of diet on chronic disease management.

For any one company to do that is prohibitive, unless you’re one of the massive pharmaceutical companies. What that means is that the cost of innovation and the cost of the failures remain very high. Until we can lower the cost of failure, we’re not going to increase the rate of innovation in science. I think that everyone who has an interest in science has an incentive to participate in this sort of system, the same way we have an incentive to participate in the Internet. But we have to change the concept from “I’m sharing because it’s nice” to one in which we say, “I’m connecting to the shared network because that’s where the answers are.”

LR: John, you are fantastic. The world has to hear about what you’re doing. It’s such a breath of fresh air. It really could be the answer to so many of the health problems in America, and the world.

Photos by:

Nick Vedros

disrupsean

Photos licensed to the public under CC BY SA.