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Lilly and an open IT platform

May 20, 2008

Eli Lilly is opening up. According to an article in Bio-IT World, Eli Lilly has open sourced its Discovery IT platform. Anyone who has been around pharma probably did a double take, but after listening to John Reynders at the Bio-IT World Conference, I am not as surprised (apparently this effort started while he was at Lilly).

The underlying question, as framed by Susie Stephens, principal research scientist with Lilly.

Do we [biopharma] all really need to manage very similar resources or are there areas where we can work together?

Is this the sign of a new outlook at pharma. Perhaps only just a little bit, but there are clear signs of a change. Consortia sharing pre-competitive information, companies making GWAS data public and Lilly’s efforts here. I think it is clear that people need to collaborate, try and leverage common strengths, and Discovery IT is a commodity in most cases so it’s not like you are throwing the crown jewels away. What’s important is how you implement it, which will vary across companies.

The Lilly Life Science Grid is a visualization framework that allows developers to write plugins built on top of Microsoft .NET 2.0 (not everything can be perfect ). To an extent this competes with platforms like Pipeline Pilot and Inforsense. although the scope is much smaller. I’d be interested to see what those companies have to say about that? I’d also be interested in finding out if they consider their server side framework something they’d open source as well

Perhaps what pleased me the most was how the platform was being distributed. On Sourceforge, via a Berkeley license. The question going forward is a simple one. Will there be other people contributing? Will Lilly continue to make new developments to the grid available? Will other companies adopt the platform? and so on and so forth.

Regardless, this is significant, and is part of a trend of a more open, more virtualized biopharma industry. It also reflects the reality of companies realizing what is a commodity and where real competitive advantage lies.

Technorati Tags: Eli Lilly, Life Science Grid, Open Source, BioIT