Meeting

The field of genomics holds the promise to revolutionize personal medicine, from increasing an individual's awareness of risk for common diseases to individualized drug design and development.  However, even with the significant increase in basic discoveries because of technologies developed out of the sequencing of the human genome ten years ago, there has been an inability to translate these discoveries into appreciable therapeutics, diagnostics, and preventions for human disease.  Much of the translation gap is due to a lack of funding to substantiate the clinical relevance of early discoveries from the public sector and an increase in the cost and time it takes to move discoveries to market from industry (while also seeing fewer approvals through the regulatory process). Recently, an increased focus has been put on public-private partnerships to bridge this growing divide in the translation pathway and more evenly distribute the risk involved amongst all parties in a precompetitive environment.

Precompetitive collaboration is the sharing of resources amongst competitors at early stages of discovery with the goal of providing benefit to all parties.  Industry, academia, and government all hold tools, knowledge, and, of special significance for genomics-based research and discovery, biological reagents which could be used collaboratively to speed the drug development process. Stored biological samples provide a resource of genetic information which can be used to develop individualized treatment regimens or even drug and diagnostic devices. Having biospecimens available for precompetitive use can offer substantial benefits to all parties; however, with this type of sharing a number of issues have to be overcome first. This public workshop will perform an in-depth examination of the issues which are currently preventing the precompetitive sharing of biobanked specimens from various stakeholder perspectives by aiming to:

• Elucidate a conceptual framework for sharing of biological resources from many different stakeholders - academia, industry, government, and others;
• Examine the rules of engagement which would allow for genomics-based collaboration;
• Look at best practices that make collaboration work and how that applies to genomics;
• Identify specific examples from other industries that have engaged in precompetitive collaboration.