The medical world is pleasingly one of the more fervent adopters of crowd based approaches.  I wrote last year about the tremendous success enjoyed by the radiology wiki Radiopaedia, which bills itself as a Wikipedia for radiologists, is a veritable treasure trove of x-rays, MRI scans and other explorations of our innards.

The site was built in 2005 by Australian radiologist Frank Gaillard with the aim of providing professionals with a substantial database of all manner of scans.  What started as a simple Wiki type site has grown to be much more interactive.  It’s common now for instance for professionals to upload a patients scan and seek a 2nd opinion on their diagnosis.

A wiki for chemical probes

Building on this kind of success is a new site that was launched recently to help spread good information about chemical probes.  The site, called the Chemical Probes Portal, is a community driven wiki site that was created by a panel of experts from over 45 research centers around the US and Europe.

Chemical probes play a crucial role in biomedical research.  They’re used to inhibit the function of certain proteins to help understand the role those proteins play in the body.

The creators suggest however that many poor quality probes are used in research, which causes researchers to have a poor idea of the true impact of them.

For instance, a common issue is that some chemical probes bind additional proteins to the ones claimed by their manufacturer, which prompts what’s known as off-target effects.  In worst case scenarios this can render research useless.

The lack of information surrounding these poor quality probes can result in researchers continuing to use them, even when better quality probes are available.

This is compounded by the poor job traditional search engines do at highlighting this issue.  Hence the creation of the portal.

It’s designed to act like TripAdvisor, with researchers encouraged to share their experiences with particular probes, and to therefore provide researchers with the latest information that they can use to make the best decisions possible.

The extent of the problem

The creators suggest that misunderstandings around chemical probes results in thousands of papers each year published that are based on incorrect assumptions about the probes, and which subsequently results in faulty conclusions being made.

The team hope that the portal will be used not only by researchers but by journal editors and reviewers to ensure that research is as accurate as possible.

“Chemical probes are crucial to biomedical research and drug discovery, but many of those in use actually have completely different effects from those that are claimed for them. It’s a widespread problem that is causing much confusion, damaging the quality of important research studies, misleading scientists, wasting time and money – and ultimately slowing down the search for new cancer drugs. This is an urgent issue and we hope the new wiki site will help where more conventional communication mechanisms have failed, by providing TripAdvisor-style user-generated information about which probes to use and how,” the team say.