Todd has previously applied the open source approach to a project which focused on making a drug for the parasitic disease, Bilharzia.

"We solved that problem much faster because we had everything open source and we had a bunch of advice and help from people, particularly companies," he said. "We discovered the way of making this molecule which is now being looked at by a company to scale up.

"We had about 100 contributions from people from outside of our core team at the University of Sydney and about 75 per cent of these were from industry so the minority of comments were from academia which was surprising, I expected academics to get way behind the project but it's as though they were more secretive than industrialists."

Follow Chloe Herrick on Twitter: @chloe_CW

Follow Computerworld Australia on Twitter: @ComputerworldAU