The Construction Of Collaborative Drug Discovery Platform And Research On Its Trust Mechanism

The enormous profits brought by drug discovery make drug discovery a major research direction taken by various pharmaceutical institutions and other institutions focused on drug R&D (research and development). But its long R&D cycle, high investment and high risk keep these research institutions seeking for new technologies and R&D modes. Along with the opening of market, collaborative R&D mode becomes a trend in drug discovery area. Collaborative R&D makes various research institutions do researches together and share the risks and profits by signing agreements based on the complementation of their own superior resources.Herein, we present a resource-centric collaborative work platform for workflow-driven drug discovery projects. This platform is specific to new R&D mode with collaborative innovation and aimed at assisting cooperation chemistry teams in recording laboratory notes, choosing the appropriate partners and so on. The functionalities supported by this platform include resource management (including human resource and chemicals), electronic laboratory notebook, analysis and calculation on molecule information, etc. Based on these basic functionalities, the platform advocates chemistry teams to share their own superior resources and discovery experience in the public information module so as to attract beneficial collaborative project.Our platform establishes a complete and compact set of procedures for collaborative drug discovery projects, including choosing the partners, customizing the workflow, signing the agreements, assigning tasks, examining the periodic progresses and approving the final achievements. The projects can be promoted smoothly only by mutual trust and concerted efforts. To achieve this goal, a trust mechanism based on reputation is embedded into the platform. The mechanism estimates the reputations of chemistry teams by collecting evaluations generated in the past cooperation, in order to restrain and guide the users’ behavior throughout the interactive process. With adequate consideration on the particularity of drug discovery and many influence factors, like the drug R&D capabilities of teams, the performed times, the relationship between partners and the participation of teams, this paper conducts in-depth study of trust and builds a valid trust mechanism for collaborative drug discovery to create a great atmosphere for communication and cooperation.