Scientist’s CEO, Kevin Lustig, spoke in a recent episode of the Burrill Report about the Open Science movement and how the democratization of drug research will be the key to paving a sustainable future for the pharmaceutical industry.

The industry faces a “perfect storm” of problems, as Kevin puts it, because of the following:

the cost of drug research and development are rising

patents for once blockbuster drugs are expiring and diminishing revenues

clinical success rates are declining

To alleviate the financial stress and address the dire need for innovation in new therapeutics, Scientist and many others have spearheaded the Open Science movement allowing any researcher open access to technologies and expertise to run their own drug discovery project and find a cure – all of which can be done on their laptop or mobile devices.

Three main solutions have been established from the Open Science movement to tackle the challenges in the industry:

crowd-funding organizations help promote interest and obtain resources for drug discovery programs

applications like Scientist provide researchers a powerful online tool to access research vendors, services, and products to help streamline their projects

gateways for publishing and sharing of information to offer global transparency of research in any therapeutic area

Although not everyone embraces the idea, it’s understood that the current drug discovery process is broken and something needs to change in order to revitalize researchers to innovate and make breakthrough discoveries.

The Cloud has provided the technology, and now it’s time for the crowd to stimulate innovation.