Accelerating discoveries to revolutionize human health: Aled Edwards

Human genome research has the potential to revolutionize medical discoveries. By providing researchers with the code for the human body, it is revealing new targeted medical treatments for common diseases, often with greater success rates and fewer side effects.

Despite the many scientists motivated by the huge potential of genomic research to make a difference, competition is slowing down progress. The traditionally hyper-competitive culture of medical and drug discovery research often leads to duplicated efforts, which wastes valuable time and money.

Aled Edwards, a biomedical researcher from the University of Toronto, had a vision for a totally different approach to research. He founded the Structural Genomics Consortium in 2004 to revolutionize the drug discovery process after becoming frustrated with the bureaucratic red-tape and international funding models that were negatively impacting work in his field.

The radical innovation at the heart of SGC: no patents. SGC is a not-for-profit, public-private partnership between researchers, pharmaceutical companies and governments around the world. Why would anyone, especially pharmaceutical companies, forgo a patent? Aled is proving how this collaborative model of medical discovery is just better business: companies get access to the basic scientific research they need faster so that they can develop targeted drugs more efficiently.

SGC’s open-access environment maximizes impact of research by exchanging materials and ideas without restrictions, decreasing research overlap and stretching funding dollars further — ultimately accelerating powerful human genomics discoveries and laying the framework to make these drugs more accessible and affordable for all.

So far, SGC is using its open-source format to release the structures of more than 1,300 proteins, with implications for the development of new therapies for diabetes, cancer, obesity and psychiatric disorders. SGC has raised roughly $200 million from private-sector investments. Because this approach enables more efficient research, it frees scientific capacity to investigate lesser-known areas of human genomics.

Lately, Aled is driving a new drug discovery business model in which affordable pricing is the raison d’être. He has founded two “open drug discovery” companies to test the model. Medicines for Kids (M4K) Pharma is developing a new treatment for a uniformly fatal children’s brain cancer called diffuse intrinsic pontine glioma, and Medicines for Neurodegeneration (M4ND) Pharma is focusing on Parkinson’s disease, ALS and Alzheimer’s. The two M4 companies are owned in their entirety by a Canadian charity called the Agora Open Science Trust. Agora’s mission is to ensure that any new medicines brought to market through the activities of M4K or M4ND are priced as low as possible to ensure that they are accessible to everyone.

Aled is leading a fundamental shift in how medical research is done that has the power to unlock accessible and affordable health globally.