The idea for Collaborative Toolkit came about several years ago when some of the Business Managers at CRT realised that we didn’t have a platform to share tools that we have developed in the course of our drug discovery programs. Before Collaborative Toolkit the only way we shared tool reagents was either by selling them through Ximbio, by sharing them by out-licensing to companies. In the middle of those two extremes, there is a small subset of tools that are not suitable for either Ximbio or licensing but that do still have intrinsic value as target validation reagents. What we wanted to do was to fill that niche.
Collaborative Toolkit builds on the typical way that scientists share their reagents. Often a researcher will find a reagent in a publication and request it from the scientists who made it. Then it will get shared under the terms of an MTA. The researcher may get sent a few protocols and have a couple of email conversations with the scientist who shared their reagent. But, more often or not, without a formal collaboration that’s where the interaction ends. We all know the frustration of trying desperately to get an antibody or an inhibitor to work in an assay unsuccessfully, only to find out later that the reagent was completely unsuitable for that assay, or certain conditions are needed to get it to work. This is hugely frustrating, and it wastes precious time and money.
By virtue of the fact that our tools are products of drug discovery research, a lot of money, time, effort, tears and, dare I say it, love, have been poured into them. The teams who have worked with them for years know the tools inside out, they have developed and validated protocols and assays to use them in. Because of this we realised that we didn’t want to just give the tools away, we also wanted to have the chance to work with the researchers using them, to share our knowledge and experiences working with the tool and help shape the research. Essentially, what we wanted to do with Collaborative Toolkit was to create a hybrid between a formal collaboration and a simple exchange of material.
The beauty of Collaborative Toolkit is that it encourages collaboration within and outside of the oncology community. I think the fact that it enables any life sciences researcher from around the world access to unique, well-validated tools that are not available anywhere else is pretty incredible. As one of the developers of Collaborative Toolkit what I would love to see is a collaboration that results in a publication – for me that would mean that Collaborative Toolkit has been a success.
Project Development Manager
chyder@cancertechnology.com