Biopeer, according to the companies, is designed to enable industry life sciences researchers from both the private and public sectors to share ideas within a global online community.
The business reason that Biopeer was started was a recognition that the number of drugs approved for human use each year has plummeted over the past five years, while the amount of money spent on developing drugs has skyrocketed, said co-founder Eric Gerritsen. Part of the reason for this poor productivity is that too much information is trapped in silos within corporations and researchers cannot connect ideas properly across the globe.
The blog comes as the Pew Internet & American Life Project reported that 11 million Americans have created blogs and some 32 million American adults read them. Biopeer is expected to offer an effective publishing architecture that combines blogging with RSS (Really Simple Syndication) to push content directly to computers.
Biopeer is said to be covering over 30 areas of research and plans to expand to 100. Key subject areas include stem cells, bioinformatics, women’s health and topical subjects of global interest like avian flu.
