Open Source Good Match for Pharma?

From MSNBC

"Pharmaceuticals represent one new and surprising area where freely shared innovation is catching on. Most industry profits have been made from expensive patented drugs. But now the BioBricks project at MIT is trying to establish standardized tools and processes for research. That way, researchers from everywhere can contribute.

Open innovation also makes sense in industries where patents aren't relevant—for example, finding new uses for existing drugs. Eric Von Hippel, MIT's head of innovation and entrepreneurship, is studying FDA applications since 1998 for these so-called off-label uses of patented drugs to see whether, as he suspects, they come mostly from independent researchers rather than the big drugmakers holding the original patents. If they do, it means open-source innovation is already well underway."