Put it on the blockchain

Turning sundry chemical compounds into actual drugs is famously expensive, time-consuming, and maddeningly failure-prone. Which is why 10 pharmaceuticals just agreed to embrace a pair of buzzwords in the name of bending the curve.

According to the Financial Times, a cadre of companies including Johnson & Johnson and AstraZeneca are handing over their compound libraries to “a secure, blockchain-based system” that will allow a “machine-learning algorithm” to trawl the combined data for clues on which molecules might grow up to treat a disease.

This might sound familiar. For roughly the past decade, pharma companies have been sharing their libraries with one another in the name of accelerating the discovery process. The likes of Roche, AstraZeneca, Bayer, and GlaxoSmithKline, have all opened up their vaults with the exact same goals as the agreement described above.

The novel part is putting it on the blockchain, a massively hyped technology that basically boils down to a fancy ledger. Whether doing so really is “invigorating discovery efforts through efficiency gains,” as the project’s leader claims to FT, remains to be seen.