BioCentury
ARTICLE | Strategy

The not-for-profit play

June 4, 2001 7:00 AM UTC

Although MDS Proteomics Inc. is in business to discover and develop drug candidates based on knowledge gleaned from proteomics, the company last week set up a not-for-profit organization with IBM Corp. to aggregate protein interaction data from public sources.

While it seems contradictory to give away information on which its business is based, MDS believes that it will be able to benefit in two ways. First, by housing the information in a non-profit entity, it will be incenting academic researchers to do the work of putting their data into a central repository. Second, and probably more important, MDS will be able to ensure that the data will be compiled in a manner that is compatible with the company's internal data and tools...