Private labs, of course "What used to take months can now be done in weeks." (GlaxoSmithKline). This data will be the "point of start" for those trying to develop some working drugs. They will make the investment and take the profits.

. Lets see how this contract face the laboratories desire to keept their developments protected by patents.

Thank you for your replies. I was wondering because it seems to me that this issue is one that needs to be managed very carefully.

Personally, as a cancer patient on a very expensive treatment, I am ambivalent about the drugs companies. The treatment I am on, a monoclonal antibody) is very likely to make a huge difference to my chances for survival, despite being much less debilitating than the other treatments I have had, so I understand what it is like to have one's life depend on drug innovations. I know people hate the drugs companies, but sometimes the drugs really make a difference and, having had my immune system temporarily devastated by chemo lots of times, I know that I would hate to have AIDS.

On the other hand, my treatment is so expensive that many people who need it can't afford it, even in the United Kingdom, which is, in the grand scheme of things, a relatively prosperous country. I can just about afford it myself and health care systems everywhere are really struggling with the cost of this drug, so I can understand why people aren't happy about drug company prices and problems of availability.

Personally, I try to console myself with the thought that even if the drugs companies develop something from our public domain intellectual property that they can patent, patents don't last forever and the sooner things get on patent, the sooner they will come off. If we accelerate the search for AIDS drugs like we have speeded up folding of the Human Proteome, I would hope that we would save more than the fifteen years covered any patent would cover.

It is obviously the large drug companies who are going to make use of the results of this work, and I have no problem with this so long as the final price of the drug reflects the fact that a significant aount of the research work was done for them.

However what is at the back of my mind any probably many other is that companies will attempt to hijack the work mach as they did with the human genome project where chunks of human DNA were patented for particular treatment applications, thus effectively blocking others for developing gene therapies based on that gene sequence.

Hopefully someone has thought of this and the the result will be protected is some way thus preventing companies from patenting the various molecules and dockings we all busy analysis.

It's good to hear this.