With the immense success of Ayurveda and Yoga, India is taking a proactive lead in creating a healthcare system with the potential to bring affordable modern pharmaceutical products to every ailing person whatever financial status he/she has. The new initiative is called “Open Source Drug Discovery”. The term gained popularity with the rise of LINUX operating System and more recently, in Biology with the Human Genome Sequencing Project (HUGO initiative). Open Source is expected to providing better quality, higher reliability, more flexibility and lower cost. It will bring an end to closed-door activities that substantially increase cost of drug discovery.
Open Source Drug Discovery is an initiative led by the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR). The new method believes that drug discovery needs to move out from behind the closed doors of pharmaceutical companies to the open minds of the younger generations. It delivers the power of genomics and computational technologies into the hands of the young, the capable and motivated, enabling students, scientists, technocrats, universities, and corporations to work together. It is a de-centralized web-based global community-wide effort. The thrust is to bring down the cost of drug discovery significantly by knowledge sharing and constructive collaboration and to establish a novel open source platform for both computational and experimental technologies. By making drug discovery for infectious diseases, cost effective and affordable, OSDD could grow into a program that seeks to find cures for diseases that affect the world’s poorest of the poor.
The entire process of drug discovery is resource-extensive and the necessity of safeguarding Intellectual Property Rights, maintaining confidentially of drug development and overheads, etc substantially raises costs. Any pharmaceutical company seeking to launch a new drug therefore actively works to guarantee profitable sales. So pharmaceutical companies lend to favor the disorders and disease that state the affluent countries. Very few companies venture into the realm of diseases of the poverty stricken third world. They turn to diseases like malaria, leishmaniasis, and tuberculosis. Currently, there are only a fraction of drugs under clinical testing for TB as compared to those for cancer. Actually pharmaceutical companies hesitate in investing in diseases of the third world primarily due to the small market size represented by potential buyers. The discovery of development of a new drug costs approximately USD 250-800 million and takes about 12 years on an average. Developing economies simply don’t represent the market. These companies seek for a profitable return of their investments. For infectious diseases like TB, the market size is only about USD 300m – not a lucrative enough margin of profit. However, TB patients still await a good fast acting drug, or even a vaccine that confers long lasting protection. There are still far too few compounds that represent new chemical classes with novel mechanisms of action and a low probability of encountering drug resistance. The lack of drugs exacerbates an already desperate situation. OSDD seeks to bridge this very gap. The OSDD concept takes into cognizance harsh facts. The first is that we must help ourselves because these are our problems. We must target these diseases that the world chooses to ignore but which still cast a very dark shadow over India. The second is that we need to make these drugs at low cost. In an environment where implementing subsidies and controls may not always be easy, it is best to discover drugs at a low cost. OSDD believes that we have the ability and expertise to do so, and also, the will and requisite determination.
The new method has chosen tuberculosis (TB), the one which is rampant in developing countries as its first target. WHO reports that one third of the world’s population is currently infected with TB. At least one person in the world is newly infected with the TB every second and 450,000 new Multiple Drug Resistant-TB cases are estimated to occur every year. Left untreated, each person with active TB will infect between 10-15 people every year. There are over a 1000 TB related death a day or 2 TB deaths every 3 minutes. Therefore, it is purely a burning question to invent a new and affordable drug to save the lives of TB patients. Early stage drug discovery is the major block on the route to discovering novel drugs for TB. Here OSDD begins to work.
Independent and registered contributors of OSDD share their work through the internet. Any idea, software, article that help in expediting the process of drug discovery is treated as a contribution. As part of an on-line community, the contributors may work from anywhere in the world at any time that suits them. The process is like this: - The entire process of drug discovery is divided into ten work packages (WPs) and posted on OSDD website. WPs are open to anyone with the expertise and desire to solve them. WPs 1-8 would be implemented in phase 1 (2007-2012) and WPs 9 and 10 would be implemental in 2012–2017. Peer-reviewing of the contribution(s) and appropriate recognition for the correct solutions follow the submission of “solution(s)”. In addition, challenges are also posted on the OSDD website and appropriate rewards given for correct solutions. OSDD welcomes all who are ready to share their time and resources. Appeals have been made to philanthropic organization, wealthy corporate to sponsor OSDD. Registered users may contribute their thesis to OSDD provided they hold the copyright and their actions are not in conflict with the policies of their organization. Users may also donate intellectual property as long as they hold the exclusive rights. Of course, the ability to contribute meaningfully is decided by the types of challenge posted. OSDD maintains a page for summer projects. Students may register, work and report online. Those who contribute to OSDD as part of their projects get certificates as per recommendations of a review committee.
