When the COVID-19 pandemic struck, scientists, corporations and governments around the world scrambled to share research data and ideas to advance the understanding of the disease and produce life-saving vaccines and therapies in record time.
For many, it was a crash course in “open science” — the practice of freely sharing research information and, often, eschewing intellectual property protections on early-stage inventions for the sake of accelerating discovery.
But for University of Toronto Professors Elizabeth Edwards (ChemE) and Aled Edwards (Medical Biophysics, Molecular Genetics), it was little more than a well-publicized example of an approach for which they’ve long been advocates (and an example Aled argued should have been extended by making access to COVID-19 vaccines more equitable globally). Over the course of their careers, the two researchers — who are married — have attracted numerous industry partners to open science initiatives in medicine (Aled) and engineering (Elizabeth), helping establish U of T as a hotbed of what could be described as a new model of innovation.
Read the full U of T Engineering News story.