Monday, February 10, 2014

HEALTH - 10 Big Drug Companies Band Together for Cures

"Ten big drug companies unite to study major diseases" PBS Newshour 2/8/2014

Excerpt

HARI SREENIVASAN (Newshour):  Earlier this week, 10 big drug companies that rarely share their secrets agreed to work together with the National Institutes of Health.  Their goal: finding cures for a number of major diseases including diabetes and Alzheimer’s.  The project will last five years, cost $230 million and at the end, all the findings will be free for anyone to use.

Here to help us understand it all is Monica Langley from The Wall Street Journal.  So has anything ever been tried on this scale before?  I mean these are arch rivals?

MONICA LANGLEY, The Wall Street Journal:  Nothing has been tried on this scale, with this many diseases and with this amount of collaboration.  And the biggest revelation of all is that they are going to put all their discoveries out to the public so that the biggest pharmaceutical companies or the littlest startup will have access to any discovery.  It can go compete to try to find a cure for any of these diseases.

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