Chemical publisher goes after NIH

William Wagner · medicine forum Guru Joined: 29 Apr 2005 Posts: 809

This has hugh ramifacations.

Bill

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Chemical publisher goes after NIH

BY Aliya Sternstein
Published on May 27, 2005

http://www.fcw.com/article88988-05-27-05-Web

The American Chemical Society (ACS) is lobbying Congress to rein in a
new National Institutes of Health database of biomedical research
because, the society argues, the government-run database infringes on
the private sector.

NIH launched the database, PubChem, in 2004 as part of NIH's Roadmap
Initiatives to speed new medical treatments and improved health care to
Americans. PubChem catalogs the names and structures of 850,000
chemicals. This number is expected to grow.

ACS fears that PubChem will duplicate its Chemical Abstracts Service
(CAS). Officials at the two organizations have exchanged letters,
meetings and phone calls since 2004.
At an impasse, ACS is now urging policy-makers and Congress to refocus
PubChem.

ACS believes strongly that the federal government should not seek to
become a taxpayer-supported, competitive scientific publisher," ACS said
in a statement. "By collecting, organizing and disseminating
small-molecule information whose creation it has not funded and which
duplicates CAS services, NIH has started, rather ominously, down the
path to unfettered scientific publishing.

³NIH does amazing things as far as funding basic research, but we¹re
getting into a little bit of mission creep here...the site will come at
the expense of NIH basic research, said Brian Dougherty, senior adviser
to the chief strategy officer at ACS.

ACS officials worry that NIH will find biological relevance in any small
molecule.

Dougherty said ACS suggested a technical working group to set parameters
for PubChem to focus on only the small molecules that relate to bioassay
data, information collected about the strength or biological activity of
a substance, such as a drug, by comparing its effects with those of a
standard preparation on living cells. ³NIH has been unwilling to put
anything in writing, he said. ³We think this is going to put us out of
business if it keeps growing and no parameters are set.

NIH officials said they are confused as to why ACS insists PubChem will
affect the organization's business when the two organizations' missions
and audiences are different.

³What is in common is a relatively small number of compound structures
and names," said Christopher Austin, senior adviser to the translational
research director at the NIH Chemical Genomics Center at the National
Human Genome Research Institute. "ACS has gotten hung up on this. They
have taken this, frankly, rather disingenuously, to implicate that
PubChem duplicates CAS. CAS has 25 million structures. PubChem has about
850,000. PubChem is a subset. Not everything that is in CAS is relevant
to biomedical research.

NIH maintains that its fundamental mission is biomedical research, not
petroleum or the chemicals of companies such as DuPont and Dow Chemical.
³This list of names will get bigger, but will fill out the biological
space...not the chemical space," Austin said.

NIH officials understand that refocusing PubChem will slow medical
progress. ³It would have profoundly negative effects on this new
paradigm of making medical discoveries, right at the time that it is
just getting started.... Unfettered access to a large number of
different types of information is what allows fundamental new
discoveries to be made," Austin said. "To kill this thing when it¹s
still in the cradle would have a dramatically negative effect on medical
discovery."

The rational arguments that NIH has made to ACS have had virtually no
effect, he said. ³They are fundamentally not understanding that PubChem
deals with an entire intellectual area that they know nothing about," he
said.

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