Addressing Reproducibility in Biomedicine 

Reinforced by the successes of the SNP Consortium and the Structural Genomics Consortium, we strongly believe that open science is the most efficient way to generate common resources for the scientific community to tackle a range of problems, as well as to increase the quality of science in the public domain.  Agora seeks to catalyze and support open projects to generate high-quality resources and reagents where markets have failed to do so.   

Antibody Characterization

Antibodies are laboratory reagents used throughout biomedical research. The commercial market for these antibodies is large and growing, yet the majority available for purchase do not work as intended.  The consequences range from researchers wasting time and resources on failed experiments, to entire bodies of peer-reviewed literature being founded on faulty data. The main problem is that there are no commonly accepted quality criteria for these essential laboratory reagents.

YCharOS Inc. ('Antibody Characterization through Open Science'), a subsidiary of Agora, along with its partners at the Montreal Neurological Institute are seeking to use open science to develop and implement a community standard for antibody characterization data.  YCharOS coordinates with partners in the public and private sectors to carry out antibody characterization and make all data available to the scientific community without restriction.  The aim is to enable researchers to source the best antibodies for their studies the first time around, eliminating waste and improving the quality of published results.