This is Part 4 in a four-part series in which Dr. Kevin Lustig and Dr. Maria Thompson explore a new paradigm for virtual drug discovery in a published series of articles on Pharmaphorum. (Check out Part 1 , Part 2 , Part 3 ).

In the final part of our series on virtual drug discovery published in Pharmaphorum last month, Dr. Kevin Lustig and Dr. Maria Thompson discussed how the information age has enabled scientists to publish their findings and make their data available online for others to use.

The final installment of our series brings us full circle and details how scientists can publish electronically, and contribute their own raw data back into the knowledge pool.

The Cycle of Virtual Drug Discovery

In Part 1 of this series, we discussed how the growing amount of raw scientific data now available online makes it possible for scientists to undertake truly groundbreaking research without a laboratory. A new diagnostic test for cancer can be developed without doing any wet lab work whatsoever; simply by mining the existing pool of data from experiments others have done. For this ‘Big Data’ approach to succeed, it is important that all scientists ensure that new data they generate also finds its way back into the collective knowledge pool.

Read the paper on Pharmaphorum or download as PDF .