Big Pharma is pooling its resources and pitching in a combined $230 million for research efforts to identify biomarkers for diseases including Alzheimer’s, type 2 diabetes and rheumatoid arthritis. The project, named the Accelerating Medicines Partnership, is corralled by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and was two years in the making.

The research collaboration is expected to span between three and five years, and a key component of the effort is that the roster of drug makers—which includes AbbVie, Biogen Idec, GlaxoSmithKline, Merck and Takeda—is that they will share their results with the community at large, a strategy The Wall Street Journal notes is in line with an open-source approach that is used in other fields, but is generally anathema to a field in which healthful discoveries are valued for their scientific potential as well as their profit potential.