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. Read more…
