"Crowdsourcing" is a concept where a project is funded and contributed by many people around the world. In a similar twist to antibiotic drug discovery, the Community for Open Antimicrobial Drug Discovery (CO-ADD) was set up by scientists at the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia, in response to the growing problem of antimicrobial resistance.
CO-ADD is asking groups of chemists and scientists to send in their compounds they are researching / discovering to be tested against various bacteria and viruses. including resistant ones. The cost of screening will be met by CO-ADD and commercial rights are retained by the contributors. CO-ADD director Matt Cooper explains. 'They retain all rights to the compound … and can file patents or write grants [on the basis of assay results],' he says.
The only catch is that the group contributing a compound for screening must agree to put the screening data into a public database 18 months after getting the results.
