benaji, all the research supported by World Community Grid and our wonderful volunteers is conducted out of public or non-profit research institutions. And all projects are required to make the data generated on World Community Grid publicly available to the wider scientific community. Some projects do so while the project runs on World Community Grid (e.g. the Human Proteome Folding project published their data on a regular basis, and the Clean Energy Project published the first 2+ million results last summer while the project continues its work on World Community Grid). Other research teams wait until the project has completed its work on World Community Grid, they analyze the results, publish their findings and then publish the data. Either way, once that data is published, other researchers are free to use it for their own research. In this way, World Community Grid supports open science by making that information freely available to all.

However, the steps to go from a promising drug candidate to an actual approved drug are lengthy and very costly, which is where pharmaceutical backing often becomes essential in that lifecycle as typically research organizations would not be able to fund the entire drug development process.

Hope that clarifies the extent to which research is non-profit and our ongoing commitment to supporting open science.

Thanks benaji :)

While we have no influence on the end price of a drug, the fact that researchers get access to this vast computing power is in itself a significant cost saving to researchers. Since research organizations rarely have access to the kind and scale of computing power provided by World Community Grid volunteers, the alternative would be relying on more traditional lab testing methods to screen drug candidates - which requires a significant investment. Instead, our researchers get to screen millions of these candidates (in Chiba's case, 3 million candidates screened in just a couple of years) so that only the most promising candidates need to proceed to expensive lab testing.

And who is going to administrate such money? Another charity? Existing one? No thank you. CMO.

I don't know anything about financial processes but somehow platforms like kickstarter managed to solve the "money administration"-problem. Because if they weren't able to solve it then platforms like kickstarter simply wouldn't exist.

(What does 'CMO' stand for?)

I guess that those who have never heard of results from non-profit crunching being sold for profit have also never heard of Predictor. It used to be at Scripps, San Diego, until it was sold and moved.