Wanna team with AstraZeneca? Post on its website

AstraZeneca ($AZN) has launched a website with hopes of opening up its R&D efforts to would-be collaborators, posting its compound bank and soliciting new ideas from academia, industry and government. Through its Open Innovation platform, the company is offering up some of its clinical and early-stage candidates for potential partnerships, asking for proposals to use its targeting technology, and crowdsourcing some of its "R&D challenges," which include a $15,000 prize for ideas on new indications for some of its compounds. The effort falls under AstraZeneca's IMed program, a near-virtual R&D model in which a small team of in-house investigators works with a network of external collaborators to advance a program, and Innovative Medicines Vice President Mene Pangalos said the new platform will only further expand his company's net for promising research. More