Open Source has changed the landscape of software. Can it be a leveling force in other industries as well? India’s Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) is attempting to apply the concept of open source to the field of drug discovery.
The main goal of the initiative is to improve and provide affordable healthcare to the developing global nations. In the kickoff ceremony for the project, Kapil Sabal, India’s minister for science and technology, cited the success of open source with software and also with the human genome sequencing project, and projected that the same ideas could successfully be applied to drug discovery.
Because of the high development costs and long exploration process, many large pharmaceutical companies have little incentive to pursue projects for drugs around infectious diseases like tuberculosis and malaria. The open source model is offered as an alternative to the standard commercial approach.
CSIR has set up a web portal where members can contribute ideas, collected data can be pooled, and tools for data analysis are available. The idea is to bring in many minds, including students, researchers, doctors, academicians, and software professionals, to help with the discovery process. Bioinformatics and research by computer to supplement lab experiments and results is at the heart of the program.
The first phase of the program will target Tuberculosis. Tuberculosis is the leading cause of death as a result of a bacterial infection. One-third of the world’s population is infected with Tuberculosis with two TB deaths occuring every 3 minutes.
It will be interesting to see if any dollars from the Bill and Melinda Gates fund ever reach this project — Tuberculosis is one of that fund’s top priority global health issue too.
