Uni­ver­sity of Toronto bio­chemist Aled Edwards has been one of the lead­ing cham­pi­ons of the open-source research move­ment in drug devel­op­ment. And he has some inter­est­ing num­bers to back up his calls for a rev­o­lu­tion in research.

There are, he says, 600,000 sci­en­tists around the world who are engaged in devel­op­ing new drugs. And they spawn about 20 new ther­a­pies each year. That means that it now takes 30,000 lab-years to pro­duce a sin­gle new drug at a cost of bil­lions of dol­lars. The entire process is marked by secrecy and it is increas­ingly inef­fi­cient and wasteful.