BioCentury
ARTICLE | Company News

SPARKing data sharing

August 11, 2017 2:44 PM UTC

The Pew Charitable Trusts unveiled the Shared Platform for Antibiotic Research and Knowledge (SPARK), a cloud-based tool for data sharing and analysis in antibiotic research. The goal of SPARK is to help overcome difficulties in accessing institutional knowledge in infectious disease research that have contributed to stagnation in new antibiotic development. Pew hopes to launch a pilot of the platform within a year.

Allan Coukell, senior director for health programs at Pew, told BioCentury, "There's a huge challenge with brain drain in this space. As companies have exited the antibacterial discovery field, a lot of people who have decades of experience have either gone into retirement or moved to other therapeutic areas."...